OK, maybe try next winter?
Summer is not a season for brewing, even an English summer! Before refrigeration the English brewers—the commercial brewers I mean—would brew a strong beer before summer. During summer they would brew weak beers then beef them up with some of the strong beer. Low gravity beers would not create a lot of heat in the ferment.
When summer was lover any of the strong ale left was sold as “old ale.” Hence Theakston’s Old Peculier (peculier, a Church office IIRC) and Old Fart etc. These days they are brewed year round with glycol coils in the fermenter with the glycol pumped through a refrigerator then through the coils in the ale, then back to be cooled etc.
In the pre-Pasteur days old ale would acquire some lactic tang. In Belgium this got taken to extremes in beers such as Old Flemish Brown ale and much further in the lambic ales which were definitely sour beers. Lambics were often flavored with fruit. I don’t know of any real lambics being made anymore. I used to like Morte Subite (Sudden death! Not related to the beer!) cassis but now that is just alcoholic slightly sour cordial, yuck! Timmerman has been rubbish since I found out about lambics. Real lambics take years to make, ties up a lot of capital. Geuze is young lambic.
A sour beer might sound awful but can be refreshing on a hot day. They sourness comes from various bacteria.
I did make a Flemish Old Brown and added 5kg of second grade cherries to it (hail damaged, got the 5Kg for $15, didn’t matter what they looked like!) The fruit sugars get fermented, of course. Cherries and dark beers go together very nicely. Any cherries I can’t get rid of or get damaged will get frozen and added to a beer! Or mead.
For some of these beers, especially Belgians, you need the right yeast. Could try adding a dry wheat beer yeast but really you need to get into liquid yeast.
Want some sour beer:
https://wyeastlab.com/wild-sour-strainsBelgian and other ales and lagers:
https://wyeastlab.com/beer-strainsThere is also White Labs but really Wyeast will do you fine. These yeasts come in “smack packs” with yeast in the outer pack and an inner pack containing yeast nutrients. “Smacking” the pack means finding and bursting the inner sachet and massaging it a bit to get all the yeast food out. The yeast eats the food releasing gas and the big outer pack swells up. The yeast can now be pitched into a starter. A 2L Erlenmeyer flask is ideal, you can make up a weak wort, boil that on the stove top, cover with aluminium foil and place it in a sink of cold water to cool the starter solution down.
Expect to pay about $20 per sachet—you want to be a dab hand at making and splitting starters and work out sets of beers, beginning with a low alcohol, pale beer and racking that off the yeast cake and pitching a stronger, darker beer on the cake, etc. So a small pale ale, followed by a stronger, darker Extra Special Bitter and finally a barleywine. Commercial brewers split a fresh consignment of yeast 8 ways and repitch the yeast 8 times but they have biological labs etc to ensure the yeast is clean. Three times is as much as homebrewers should go for.
Some get a bit fanatical and buy petri dishes, a platinum look, agar agar etc and when they buy a Wyeast sachet dip the loop into the yeast, and scratch it into the agar agar in the bottom of the dish, cover it etc. Yeast grows in little colonies—you have seen the sort of thing no doubt in school or on telly etc. To start a beer they scrape up one such colony, pitch it into a starter etc. Really need lab gear, a heater with a magnetic field that causes a small steel bar in the starter to spin around, an air pump to aerate it etc. Me, I want to make beer. I don’t make enough beer to make any of that stuff worthwhile and I like making different styles of beer, etc.
