Flanders Red – 57L Barrel Project 2026

About This Beer

Owen’s 57L wild sour barrel project. A clean, BRY-97-fermented Flanders Red is blended in the barrel with the combined wild sour from his earlier split-fermentation project, then left to age long in oak.

The barrel is a 57L pre-used French oak whiskey barrel (Villard, Tonnellerie, France), from Dave Bell at Garage Project’s Wild Workshop — the same delivery that brought Matt his Lark foeder. Rather than run a full primary fermentation inside the wood, the wort is pre-fermented clean in all-rounders so the barrel is used for aging and souring, not primary — the same logic Matt uses on the foeder.

This page is the 2026 fill. The barrel was sealed under airlock on 21 June 2026 for a planned 3–4 months minimum before the first check; mixed-fermentation aging typically runs 12–18 months. FG, ABV and tasting notes will follow.

The Souring Blend — From the Split Ferment

The barrel’s wild character comes from Owen’s Wild Sour — Split Fermentation. That project ran a single Pilsner/Wheat wort across two fermenters:

• “Other Half”: half of Matt’s mixed wild culture (split between the two brewers)
• “Rua Cultivar”: Owen’s own culture, propagated from Wild Workshop Rua bottle dregs

Once both halves had fermented clean and sour with good pellicles, Owen tasted each for off-flavours, then combined them into one fermenter and added a 1L medium-DME charge to throw CO2 and purge oxygen picked up in the transfer. That combined sour — roughly 22L — is the souring engine for the barrel.

The Flanders Red Wort

The new beer is a Flanders Red on the classic template, built for long conditioning with a mixed culture. Two identical batches were brewed from Hauraki Homebrew grain (~7.49 kg each):

Vienna and Munich give depth and colour, Pilsner the clean backbone, unmalted wheat protein structure and body, Aurora and Redback fruit and toffee. The small Dark Crystal and Shepherds Delight additions are Owen’s substitution for Special B — deep dark-fruit colour for the red. Hopping is minimal: 11g Pacific Gem at the start of a 90-minute boil, just enough bittering to keep the wort hospitable to the barrel culture without fighting the funk.

Brew Day

Step mash with 18L: protein rest at 54 °C for 30 min, saccharification at 69 °C for 30 min, mash out at 80 °C for 10 min. Mash water carried ½ tsp calcium chloride. Sparge 17L at 75 °C. Ninety-minute boil with the single Pacific Gem charge at the start.

Post-chill wort pH measured 4.9 against a 5.2 target, so no lactic acid was added. Per batch: pre-boil 29L, post-boil 25L, 25L into the fermenter at OG 1.053.

Pre-Barrel Primary

Each batch fermented 6 days in a 30 L all-rounder with BRY-97, a clean, cold-tolerant ale strain. SG dropped 1.053 → 1.018 (4.6% ABV). No diacetyl rest and no cold crash — a little residual BRY-97 activity is wanted to scrub oxygen once the beer is in the barrel. The trub from both all-rounders was deliberately left behind, to avoid promoting too much Saccharomyces fermentation in the wood.

A note on the vessels: the “dirty” and “clean” all-rounders are both clean and sanitised. “Dirty” just means that PET all-rounder has previously held wild Brett and lactic bacteria — and because PET can’t be cleaned above ~55 °C, it can never be fully decontaminated, so it’s kept for sour duty.

Filling the Barrel — 21 June 2026

The barrel had been hot-washed at the Wild Workshop two weeks earlier. Owen first filled it with ~85 °C water to swell and rehydrate the staves before transferring beer, then drained it. Every transfer was a closed 2–3 psi CO2 pressure push through a line into the bung.

The 57L barrel was filled to the brim, with the balance held back in the “dirty” all-rounder under airlock as an angel’s-share reserve:

The 19L of wild sour went in last, topping the barrel to the very top. Airlocks were fitted to both the barrel and the reserve all-rounder — activity can be watched in the all-rounder — and both will be left at least 3–4 months before the first check.

Numbers

Barrel: 57 L filled, plus ~11 L reserve. FG, pH and ABV of the finished sour will follow as the barrel works.

Tasting

Not yet evaluated — the barrel has only just been filled and sealed.

Lineage

• Wild Sour — Split Fermentation (February 2026) — the source of the barrel’s wild souring blend
• This brew — Flanders Red 57L Barrel Project (June 2026) — clean Flanders Red carrying the wild sour into long oak aging
• Matt’s Foeder Pale Sour — Lark Barrel — the parallel barrel from the same Wild Workshop delivery