Belgian Wild Beer as Wash?

[tom sawyer]

All this talk of aged dunder and whatnot, has me wondering about trying to use my Belgian lambic beer as a wash. I have this 11gal wooden barrel of beer that I keep full of Flanders red, its a beer brewed with wild yeasts (Brett species) and bacteria (pediococcus, lactobacillus). The stuff tastes more like wine than beer, and the descriptors include "barnyard" and "enteric". Sound yummy? Its a really interesting brew but its acidic as all getout and I can't drink much at a time. Oh yeah and it takes about a year to brew it properly, as the yeast and bacteria take turns munching on what the other poops out. I have a 5gal batch now that I'm thinking of sacrificing to the still god (is there such a thing?) just to see what comes out. Could be that it might be used to blend with the more mundane spirits. I don't know. I'll report back when I get some results.

[maheel]

people who have tried using beer ay the hop oils mess it all up and it tastes

you might need to acid bath the still to get the oils out after....

[tom sawyer]

This kind of beer uses aged hops and not a whole lot of them. I've run beer once already and got a decent product out of it, just had to clean the still afterwards. I woudn't run a real hoppy beer, I agree.

[GuyIncognito]

So I've ran a wash sort of similar but different - it was the dregs of about 5 carboys of different sour flanders & lambic style beers. It had quite a bit of fruit pulps in it (cherry, raspberry, marionberry, blackberry) and quite a bit of yeast sediment (which I think was the problem). I ran it once in a pot still, as it was initially coming over it smelled amazing and had a nice fruity beer schnapps taste. I let it air out a day then jarred it to deal with later. When I checked on it again it had somehow developed an intensely foul, acrid, cheesy smell. Overpowering, to the point you couldn't really taste anything but the way it smelled. Never had anything like that happen before, and I've distilled a good bit of beer / fruit / grain washes. Smell never improved and I ended up lighting a campfire with it.

[Dan P.]

I've used whitelabs belgian sour mix to ferment a mash/wash for distilling (not beer-no hops). It was a good.