Charlottesville Area Masters of Real Ale

I am thinking about doing an Oud Bruin very soon. What are your thoughts on yeast? Should I do primary with a Belgian strain and then pitch either Brett B. or Roeselare for sedondary, or should I just do the full ferment using Roeselare? Or something different?

I am assuming that Jamey is probably the best person on here to answer this.

Oud Bruins (or Flanders Browns) are a little tricky. They are sours, but they are bigger, maltier, and less sour than the Reds. My first attempt in making one resulted in a more of a Red profile. It went too far into the darkside. (It was awesome, but outside the style a bit.)

I would start it with a very clean Cali strain like the WLP001 or the US-05. Let that go for a few a few days, until the batch is ~80% complete. Then rack it into a secondary and pitch the Roeselare on top of it. The trick is letting it ferment down cleanly and with a nice malt presence (removing the sweetness), then finishing it off with sourness that is apparent but balanced with the rest of the beer.

I remember hearing a Jamil podcast about this style, too, a few years ago. I would definitely listen to that before your beer day, too.

Maybe Greg, Spidey and Evan! have something to add as well. They might know sours and wilds better than I do.

IMO, this is probably the hardest sour style to make.  As the BJCP guidelines say, "A malty, fruity, aged, somewhat sour Belgian-style brown ale". It's easy to make a sour beer, but MUCH harder to make a "somewhat sour" beer. Once the bugs start eating it's tough to restrain them. I would advise that you are going to NEED temperature control to pull this off well. The Roeselare blend could be used. Maybe ferment it down first with a pure yeast like 001, European ale or WY3942 (it's the DeDolle strain), then pitch the Roeselare.  But I'd do a cool fermentation (not lager cool!), more like 60-65F to keep the yeast flavors low, bring out the maltiness, and control bacterial growth so the acidity doesn't become Flanders red-like.  Fermenting in glass would also help by reducing oxygen permeability.  Hope that helps.

Spidey is making a lot of sense in his reply. I'd say that temperature, alcohol and oxygen are big parts of the Oud Bruin. Lower temps and higher alcohol (from the clean ferment with the primary yeast) will limit and control the amount of sourness in the beer. Keeping out oxygen, too, will keep out the acetic acid characters.

Thanks for all of the advice guys. I like all of the sour styles so if something doesn't go as planned and it ends up too sour it wouldn't be a disaster, but hopefully with your advice and some temperature control I can keep the souring to level within the style. Thanks again and hopefully in a few months I'll have something for you to critique.

BTW, the Black Braggot I added the oak and Brett C. to is getting a nice, minimal amount of funk. I think it is going to turn out really nice.