Smells like a brewery in here

Brewed a Lambic style ale this evening. Traditional lambics are produced in Belgium, and they include “enteric” bacteria. That means, whatever crap is floating around the barn / was already living in those barrels gets into your beer and grows for a while before the yeast makes it too alcoholic to live in. Since I’m a control freak and don’t have oodles of patience for bad batches, I purchased the “Belgian Lambic” yeast pack from Wyeast, which is a culture taken from a mix of several commercial Lambics. Apparently there’s some lactobaccilus in there to give it a tart flavor. Other than the freaky flora, Lambics distinguish themselves by having almost no hop character (no aromatic hops, and the bittering hops boil for 90 minutes rather than the usual 45). Other than that, it’s a pretty boring half-n-half wheat and barley malt brew.

In this case, in a desperate attempt to produce something that my wife might find palatable, I’m going to do the secondary fermentation on top of 10 pounds of raspberries. I’ll be interested to see if that blows up the fermenter again.