Three+ Years of Lambic -or- I Do a Decoction Mash

Step mashes are intimidating.  Different water volumes and temperatures.  Infusing here, removing wort there.  It's one of the more advanced brewing techniques that I have yet to take on.  When my friend Steve gave me over 20 pounds of fresh Cabernet grapes a few months back, I immediately added half of them to a nearly year old Flanders Red Ale.  I froze the remainder and started to mull over the best use for them.  Ultimately I decided to do the following:

• Brew a series of three lambics, each roughly one year apart
• Blend them when appropriate (3-4+ years) into gueze
• Add fruit (the cabernet grapes, tart cherries, etc.) to portions of them if appropriate

It's an ambitious plan when you think about timelines and the potential for error-much like mead in that sense.  The desired final product is close to half a decade in the making and that's a long time to wait for certain uncertainty.  I'm hoping that I can make a quality fruit lambic using portions of the first one I brew when it's less than two years old.  With this plan solidified in my mind, I set out to learn all I could about the complexities associated with traditional lambic brewing.  I reread websites and books that had offered guidance in the past and approached them with renewed creative context.  As usual, I scoured the web for more information, the jewels of experience that make such a huge impression on my resolve to go forward with something potentially disastrous.

First water addition.

Traditional lambic brewing in the vein of Cantillon, Haansens, Oud Beersel and others typically utilizes a series of steps.  Water of different temperatures and volumes is added at particular times to raise the mash temperature and convert different starches.  Likewise, runnings are pulled from the mash and heated to halt enzyme activity and provide some of the long-term fermentables that keep non-traditional fermentation agents busy and make lambic interesting.  I went ahead and followed a comparable procedure, taking much from the Mad Fermentationist and his post on turbid mashing among other sources.  It was complicated and a little nerve-racking but worked out well in the end  Here's how the decoction mash shook out:

Minutes	Action	Volume	Water Temperature of Addition	Resulting Mash Temperature
0	Add	3.1 quarts water	144°F	113°F
20	Add	5 quarts water	212°F	136°F
25	Pull	1 quart, heat to 176°F, hold
30	Add	6.5 quarts water	212°F	150°F
60	Pull	4 quarts, add to previous quart, heat to 176°F, hold
65	Add	5.4 quarts water	212°F	162°F
75	Add	5 quarts pulled, heated wort	176°F	167°F
85	Begin sparge

I adjusted volumes slightly on the fly in order to reach the desired temperature at each step.  I ended up gathering more than 8 gallons of wort when the sparge was complete, and a pretty hard two hour boil yielded the 6+ gallons I needed (5 gallons for the lambic and one gallon for a dregs batch made with Goose Island Sofie bottle dregs).  Pulling runnings from the wort at different times was really interesting, with the liquid coming out milky white and primordially hazy.  I ended up with a better original gravity than I expected based on past efficiency, and pitched Roselaire Yeast shortly after chilling.

I'm really excited to get this process under way and am already thinking about the recipe for Lambic #2, planned for roughly a year from now.