Cranberry wheat beer

[brian_beer]

hehe, thankfully no....drinking is allowed

I am pretty lucky - previous owner had an office in the garden. It is powered and insulated already and somehow I got away with claiming it as the brewery. No running water currently but am working on that now I have a decent layout for the brew kit. At a minimum, I'm hoping to fix some pipes running from the window to the boiler so that I can quickly connect the hosepipe to it and don't have to be constantly limbo dancing around the hoses - especially during cooling its a pain at the moment. Putting a tap on it is also high on the list - running back to the house when I've not connected the chiller properly isn't much fun!

[brian_beer]

Righty, so I took the plunge and went for it a couple of weekends ago - re-racked onto the (defrosted) fruit and added the lambic yeast. It's already a good pink colour, and has a little activity - oddly seems to have picked up since the temp dropped below 13C - wasn't doing much at 17. We'll see how that goes - hoping that the shed wont get much colder for now.

I've now started to think about a couple of new things now though -

1. If I were to bottle, would those bottles ever be cleanable again? Or should I plan to ditch them - maybe I should get a throwaway keg type thing instead for this one?
2. I did leave it in my brewfridge because its out of the way and out of the sun - no cooling happening from it. Have I been stupid and risked infection of the fridge itself?
3. Is the yeast really hardy? I mean do I need to chill the crap out of it before bottling to ensure no bottle bombs, or is it ok to just chill for a week and then bottle as normal?

Cheers,
brian

[seymour]

From a recent Brett/Bottling thread: posting.php?mode=quote&f=2&p=556750

I'd suggest just priming as usual and leaving it for a while longer than usual to prime. Either the original yeast or the brett will use the sugar and make CO2 which will prime your beer.

[brian_beer]

In case anyone stumbles across this in future, just a summary on this beer.

I stupidly put most of this into the bag-in-a-box as I was scared of dirtying the bottles. In those could not get it to carb pretty much at all and have since reproduced with a normal beer, so won't use them again. That said, it drank well as a very lightly carbed cool drink - would be much better in the summer than in winter. The cranberry flavour comes through really well without making the beer too tart and you can still clearly taste the wheat beer alongside it.

I personally would not bother with the lambic yeast for future. For various reasons, I don't think that the yeast really got going in my brew and personally I don't think added much to the taste in the short term (2-3 months). Another 6 months on, there is a distinct smell to the beer which is getting somewhere towards a real lambic but for me I prefer the lighter summer drink I had earlier and would try to emulate that without it. I think that maybe cranberry doesn't have the right flavour to carry the lambic.

3 months is a long time to tie up the brewfridge but it was a nice beer and I will probably do similar again (maybe when I add a second brewfridge).