Second Sight

About This Beer

Same pale, dry, low-bitterness wort as the first pitch, and the same culture carried forward onto its own cake.

That first beer went into champagne bottles on 20 August 2026. Trub cake roused and split in half, one half back to Paul Fantham, whose culture it was originally. This wort brewed the same day and pitched straight onto the other half that afternoon. No jar, no starter, no stepping up.

Why The Same Wort

Repeating the wort exactly is what makes the two ferments comparable, since everything about the inoculum is different this time. Enormous rather than modest, already established rather than freshly stepped up, and carrying its own acidity in.

The first batch showed attenuation and acidification running on separate clocks: day 73 to reach pH 3.6, with nearly all the pH movement arriving after the wild Saccharomyces had finished the sugars. Whether a much larger and already-acidic culture shortens that second window is what this batch can answer.

One variable dropped out. The first pitch took lactic into the wort beforehand, since a small culture entering a full fermenter leaves a long window before it can defend itself. A half-cake arriving with its own acidic beer closes that window on its own, so no pre-pitch acid here. This acid curve starts from wort and culture alone.

Brew Day

Columbus at the start of the boil in place of the recipe’s Pacific Jade, simply what was on hand. Bittering only, and nothing of Columbus’s dank signature survives an hour in the kettle. Bitterness is the one number here that genuinely matters, since iso-alpha acids inhibit Lactobacillus and a mixed-fermentation beer is deliberately underbittered to let the culture acidify. The first batch acidified fully at this same bitterness.

More wort off the grain than the model predicted, so the lauter ran well and the boil took the extra back out. Into the fermenter warm and left to fall to ambient in the upstairs room: warm at the pitch for a fast start, drifting down for the long acid phase.

What’s Next

In the 30 L all-rounder in the upstairs wild workshop, on a cake that has already made one good beer. Sugar phase should be quick, since the first batch got most of the way there by day 19 off a fraction of this pitch. The acid phase is the one to watch. Sample at day 19 and day 73 to line up directly against the first batch’s readings.

Lineage

• The batch this culture came from: Foeder Pale Sour — Cube 2 / Sixth Magic
• The barrel this wort was brewed for, all seven cubes: Foeder Pale Sour, Lark Barrel
• Source of the 5 Magics line that Sixth Magic grew out of: Wild Sour — Paul Fantham Collab
• Co-located ferment in the same room: House Wild Sour