Fifty Meter Beer Project – The Big Brew Day!

Join me for my big brew day for this years Fifty Meter Beer Project! Six months after planting barley (and more than two years after harvesting the hops), this Lambic-inspired beer is in the kettle and being brewed. Most of this brewday follows traditional Lambic techniques – a malt bill featuring historical wind malt, aged hops, coolshipping to chill the beer, and a months-long fermentation to generate the wild ale characters we desire.

While reproducing this recipe may be difficult, as you need to malt your own wind malt, and also need to find a way to replicate my horrible mess of a wheat malt (see Video 4 for details), here’s the recipe for those who are interested:

Recipe – Fifty Meter Lambic-Inspired Ale

• 2.57 kg wind malt
• 2.6 kg wheat “malt” (roughly 50-50 wheat malt:raw wheat)
• 70 g 2-year aged red vine (or other low-alpha) hops

1. Mash at 70C for 45 minutes, sparge to collect ~30L
2. Boil for 3 hours, adding the hops for the last 2.5 hours. Volume should reduce to ~24L
3. Chill in a coolship
4. Let ferment for 12-18 months

Notes – Brewing this Ale

1. The coolship lost about 6L of volume overnight; need to have a pre-boil volume closer to 32L (e.g. 26L into coolship) to hit desired 20L fermenter volume