[oscarvan]

To the noob this all sounds fascinating. Could someone in five easy steps explain the process?

[jeffy]

To the noob this all sounds fascinating. Could someone in five easy steps explain the process?

1) brew beer
2) put into a long term storage vessel (ltsv) (carboy, keg, barrel) and age
3) add bugs if desired
4) remove some for drinking
5) add some more beer or wort to the ltsv to top it off and age
repeat as necessary

[tomsawyer]

To the noob this all sounds fascinating. Could someone in five easy steps explain the process?

1.  Make a beer using lambic blend, Roeselare blend, and/or bottle dregs.
2.  Add it to a barrel or other container.
3.  Periodically remove up to 50% of the beer in the container, replace it with newly brewed beer.

These beers can go two or three years to get really good, and traditionally have been blends of older and younger beers.  This technique just accomplishes the blending via the single container.  The advantage of using the wooden barrel, is that the microbes like the wood environment and the wood contributes some flavor early on.  Lambics can be made in glass though, I've done several now.

I suppose one could also do this with a Russian Imperial stout or Baltic porter.

[tumarkin]

solera is a system of aging by fractionally combining young & old beverages. take a look at the wiki entry for a fairly decent explanation of the process...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solera

[markaberrant]

I suppose one could also do this with a Russian Imperial stout or Baltic porter.

I am debating starting another one for Historical Imperial Stout with brett (no other bugs).  Can't decide whether to just make it an annual brew, or a solera project.

[oscarvan]

Ah, very enlightening. Thanks!

[tomsawyer]

Updating this thread.  I just made pull #4 from the 11gL barrel originally started March 2009.  I let time slip away, pull #3 was nearly two years prior.  This pull is a full four years from the time I started this project.  I still had some of pull 3 in a keg, so I decided to rack some pull 4 into this keg.  I tasted pull 4 and it was very nice!  Super tart and a real cherry flavor.  I also racked a few gallons into a carboy for bottling, then I replaced the missing beer with 6gal of new beer.  I made a brown ale using a generous portion of special B, choice debit termed hops and fermented with a British ale yeast.  I also added 2L of unfermented wort as an experiment to "feed the bugs".

No sign of problems, so on we go I guess.

[gmac]

Like!

[tomsawyer]

The unfermented wort was a bit of a mistake, next day I pulled the pressure relief plug on the silicone bung and yeasty goop shot out.  Probably shouldn't have filled it quite as full as I did.  It settled down by the following day at least.  I wasn't sure how active the Sacch yeast would be in the acidic environment, apparently they are just fine.