Buckwheat Trio: Belgian, British, and crazy Gose-IPA

Buckwheat Trio update:

 The Belgian T-58 and British Windsor yeasted buckwheat beers came out lovely and sessionable. (more on the gose after the break) I brought the belgian version to the KC Biermeisters competition last month and got some positive comments. My memory of the night is predictably foggy, but I think our guest of honor Stan Hieronymous liked it  A few observations:

Buckwheat Kombucha Sour

Short post-
Just brewed 3 session beers with a healthy dose of buckwheat and brown malt.

3 gal of first runnings were boiled for 15 min with no hops, then diluted and chilled for a Buckweat Gose/Berliner weisse.  Inoculated with White Labs Berliner Weiss blend, a bottle of GTs Kombucha (bacillus coagulans & S. boulardii) and some water kefir grains that I had lying around. Debating the salt addition, I'll play that by ear, but leaning towards it.

The rest of the mash became two 1.050 beers, hopped with glacier, delta, and sonnet goldings. One fermented  with Windsor, the other with T-58 (Chimay strain?)  

Experimenting with turnaround time after reading the Express Brewing article in Zymurgy a few months back - the T-58 beer was pitched on a full yeast cake, so I'm going to see if I can complete primary, cold crash, dry hop and force carb to be drinkable next weekend. 

Local Sahti Adventure Part 1

There are many ways to judge a friendship: by the ability to keep a secret, demonstrated loyalty, or some kind of convoluted ROI analysis. But for me what carries the most weight is how they respond to my schemes. When inspiration claws its way out over the face, posture tightens and the madness settles in, that's when you know who your real partners in crime are.

So one Saturday morning after my daily devotional reading of Randy Mosher's "Radical Brewing", I called my buddy Cole to inform him that we would be making an archaic Viking brew, still known to the Finns as "Sahti"....