28B Mixed-Fermentation Sour Beer
Foeder Pale Sour – Lark Barrel 2026
Grain bill
| Weyermann Barke Pilsner Malt | 6.1 kg | 55.5% |
| Weyermann Pilsner Malt | 1.2 kg | 10.9% |
| Weyermann Wheat Malt Pale | 2.7 kg | 24.5% |
| Harraways Rolled Oats | 1 kg | 9.1% |
Hop schedule
| Hop | 60 min |
|---|---|
| Simcoe | 20g |
| Pacific Jade | 27g |
Yeast
| Lallemand BRY-97 West Coast Ale | 3 packets per ~44L round in the 60L all-rounder (repitched on the same trub) |
| Wild Workshop Rua Foeder Culture | 375 mL into the barrel at the first fill |
Water additions
| Calcium Chloride | 3 g |
| Lactic Acid | Mash water to pH 5.3, sparge water to pH 5.5. No wort pre-acidification — the clean primary drops pH on its own. |
About This Beer
A pale, oak-aged sour built for the long game in an ex-Lark Distillery barrel from Dave Bell at Garage Project’s Wild Workshop. The barrel is neutral oak with very little spirit character, so the wood is a home for the culture rather than a flavour in its own right. The goal is a clean, bright, Rua-style foeder pale sour: soft acidity, gentle funk, and a continental-pilsner backbone that lets the culture lead.
The barrel is inoculated once, at the first fill, with a 375mL bottle of live culture pulled straight from Garage Project’s 8000L Rua foeder. That culture carries the house mix of Saccharomyces, Brettanomyces and lactic bacteria that gives Rua its character, and it has 12 to 18 months in the wood to make this beer its own.
This page is the 2026 fill. All three planned rounds are now in the barrel and it is aging; a fourth top-up batch is still to come, and tasting notes will follow once the culture has had time to work.
The Barrel and the Culture
This is the first fill of a barrel that should run for years. Filling it cleanly matters more than any single ingredient.
First: ferment the beer before it goes into the barrel, not in it. Running a full primary fermentation inside the barrel would leave a thick yeast bed sitting in the wood for weeks, and that risks autolysis, the savoury, marmite-like off-flavours that come from yeast breaking down. So every round is fermented out in a 60L all-rounder first, and only mostly-clear beer is moved across.
Second: fill the barrel like a keg. The barrel is purged with CO2 before each fill and the headspace is purged again afterwards, so the beer never sits on a cushion of air. Because each round is transferred just shy of fully finished, it keeps throwing a little CO2 inside the barrel, which scrubs out any stray oxygen and keeps the whole thing positive while the next rounds are brewed.
The Method
The barrel is filled in three rounds. Each round is roughly 44L of wort, fermented in the 60L all-rounder with Lallemand BRY-97, a clean and cold-tolerant ale strain that secures the beer quickly even in a cold winter garage. When a round reaches terminal gravity, it is closed-transferred under CO2 into the purged barrel. The next round is then pitched straight onto the same yeast cake, so a single pitch of yeast carries all three rounds with no extra yeast needed.
The final round was left to finish fully before transfer, since it was meant to fill the barrel to the brim with no room for an active fermentation to push over. In the end the barrel was thirstier than expected — it swallowed all three rounds and still had headroom to spare — so the 10 to 15L reserve that was meant to be held back never materialised. A fourth batch of around 23L is planned to top the barrel to the brim and finally bank an airlocked reserve for topping up as the years take their angel’s share.
The Wort
The grist is built for long conditioning with a mixed culture. A continental-pilsner base, mostly heritage Barke, gives a soft, full malt backbone, with Weyermann wheat malt for body and head structure and a portion of rolled oats for a silky mouthfeel that survives long attenuation. The wort is brewed no-chill, run hot straight into sealed cubes, and held until its fermentation round comes up.
Hopping is deliberately minimal, a single 60-minute bittering charge at around 15 IBU and nothing late, just enough to keep the wort hospitable to the culture without adding hop character that would fight the funk. Early cubes carried Pacific Jade; later cubes used Simcoe as a straight one-for-one substitute. At 60 minutes the variety barely matters, so both sit happily in the same barrel.
Status
The fill is complete. All three rounds are now in the barrel, transferred clean under CO2, finishing at a combined 1.010 FG (1.057 OG, ~6.2% ABV) measured across the three rounds on a single RAPT Pill. Round one fermented out in the all-rounder and was closed-transferred in mid-June, inoculated at that first fill with the 375mL of live Rua. Round two was pitched straight onto the round-one yeast cake, took off faster than any fermentation here ever has, and went across as soon as it hit terminal gravity. Round three — the final two cubes on the same cake for a third time, run a touch cooler — was left to finish fully and transferred on 26 June, with the sanitised line held below the beer surface to keep the fill quiet and low in oxygen.
The surprise was the barrel itself. It was thought to be a 115L barrel, but it drank all three rounds — roughly 125L of clean beer — and still has room for around ten more litres. That makes it a true quarter-cask closer to 130L, so the reserve that was meant to be held back for top-ups never happened; every drop went in. A fourth batch of around 23L is planned to fill it to the brim and finally bank that reserve. A little egg-like sulphur came off the barrel as it filled — the same benign fermentation sulphur seen earlier in the fill, expected to gas off and irrelevant under a year-plus of mixed culture. The simple pin in the bung has been swapped for a bubbler, for a clearer view of activity and a touch more protection against oxygen creeping in.
Once it is topped up, the barrel will be left to age for a minimum of 12 months, with a target of 18, sampled every three to four months and tracked toward a finished pH of 3.0 to 3.3.