I came to the award announcements today at the Lops brewery because i wanted feedback on my little bottle bombs . As soon as I saw how over-carbonated my beer was back in September , I decided to send it anyway just to participate and see what they would say . Well, the consensus was that gruit beers are not really their thing 😝

They thought it was a wild fermentation

The aroma by one judge was said to be “wild fermentation“, and another said “might be infected”. Now there may be a chance that it may be infected ? That’s what my next batch will reveal with Escarpment labs Hydra yeast.

This is essentially what my fascination of sideritis beer is . The esters and phenols make a totally straightforward single grain single hop bittered beer with a 15 min boil of this herb into something something so unique after fermentation. Some of comments were positive , but I think it was its just too outside of the realm of beer to hit their palates in a comfortable way. I know they had to look up sideritis on their phones , and one of the comments was that it was very tea like and astringent . I say this because a local brewery owner and his head brewer tasted it without knowing the secret ingredient and they liked it. I mentioned I used Agave , and that person said it tasted Like tequila. A group of 4 friends , which one was a homebrewer also liked it and said it was really strange , and someone visiting from Poland also liked it. I’m not saying just because people like it it’s a great beer , I’m just getting data to understand what i got to work with. As mentioned before , the Hydra yeast was created to enhance biotransformation.

So rather than try different beer styles for each brew , I’m going to continue experimenting with this beer , and every other brew, make beers me and my wife enjoy.

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Wild yeast update

I’m regaining my sense of smell, so my real wild fermentation is arriving at the 2 week mark, and I will send the sample of yeast to Bootleg biology from this batch. It’s still fermenting , so it’s Time to release the schmoos from schmoo jail and ship them off to Nashville !