Sixth Magic

About This Beer

The eighth cube of the Lark barrel wort, diverted. Eight cubes were brewed off five brew days for that barrel, and the barrel was still inbound, so rather than hold a sealed cube indefinitely this one went onto Paul Fantham’s culture instead.

Same wort as the seven that did go into the wood, and the same wort again in Second Sight, brewed on this beer’s cake in August. Three beers, one grist.

The culture

Paul evolved the 5 Magics trub through a third-generation brew, the one after Matt and Jamie’s collab was kegged in February. He then captured that Gen-3 trub and combined it with whole organic muscat grapes, fruit and all, rather than skins alone. The wild microflora rides on the skins, so that is where the Hanseniaspora, Pichia, possibly Saccharomyces uvarum and the environmental lacto and pedio come from, but the whole fruit brings its sugars in with them. Stepped up over several rounds in DME starters, then split into two jars. Matt got one.

Sixth Magic is Paul’s five with the grapes folded in as a sixth. It marks the point where the lineage stopped being purely Paul’s culture and became a thing of its own.

Pitched 17 May

650 mL of culture into about 20 litres of cube wort at pH 6.0, with 2.5 mL of lactic in beforehand as insurance: a small pitch entering a full fermenter leaves a long window before the culture can defend itself.

Three readings

Two points of gravity across eleven weeks, and six tenths of pH. On this culture pH is the live measurement and gravity is the one that goes quiet early. A wild beer that looks finished on the hydrometer is still changing in the glass for months. That finding is the reason Second Sight repeats this wort exactly, to see whether a large established pitch shortens the acid phase.

The two readings also sit alongside the House Wild Sour in the same room at the same temperature, on a very different culture. Both were sampled on 29 July and both read 1.002, having arrived there by completely different routes.

Day 95, bottled

A tasting on Saturday 15 August settled it: the beer was good, and good is a reason to package rather than keep waiting. Into glass five days later.

Eighteen litres into champagne bottles, 36 × 375 mL and 6 × 750 mL with 29 mm crowns, plus one 750 mL PET as a squeeze-gauge so carbonation can be tracked without opening any glass. Champagne bottles because a live mixed culture keeps working in the package and these take roughly double the pressure a normal beer bottle is comfortable with.

Every bottle purged with CO₂ and filled from the bottom up off a wand, with the beer pushed out under pressure and the fermenter never opened.

Primed light on purpose: about 48 g of dextrose across the 18 litres, near 1.5 volumes once the CO₂ already in solution is counted. A soft bead suits an acidic ester-forward wild beer better than a champagne-like one. More to the point, the priming sugar is only ever half the input here, because whatever the culture adds over the coming months stacks on top of it, and there is no taking carbonation back out of a sealed bottle.

Where it finishes is genuinely open. The culture is alive and the bottles are warm, and Brettanomyces works dextrins ordinary yeast cannot. Against that, gravity did not move between day 73 and bottling, so the readily fermentable pool looks close to spent. The falling pH is no evidence either way, since homofermentative Lactobacillus makes lactic acid without any CO₂ at all.

Somewhere between 1.8 and 2.8 volumes, then, and the low end is a perfectly good place for it. Bottles sit warm at 18 to 22°C for now. Squeeze the PET weekly; when it firms and stops changing, it is where it is going to get to and can move to cool storage.

Lineage

• Source of the 5 Magics line: Wild Sour — Paul Fantham Collab
• The barrel this wort was brewed for: Foeder Pale Sour, Lark Barrel
• Pitch 2, on this beer’s cake: Second Sight
• Co-located ferment, different culture: House Wild Sour