THE WAKKER WEEKLY – Issue #1797
Issue #1797 – Posted on: 04 – July – 2025
BUSHWAKKER SEASONAL SUDS STATUS. The July 4th edition of First Firkin Friday will see our very first Sour beer! The firkin of TANGERINE DRAGON FRUIT SOUR will be piped-in and tapped at 5:30 PM. Bushwakker head brewer, Michael Gaetz, also reports our seasonally available PONCE DE LEON BLACKBERRY RASPBERRY ALE, KAI’S MUNICH HELLES, ENIGMA PALE ALE and CYCLONE BARLEYWINE are currently available. There are also batches of RASPBERRY SOUR, BOMBAY IPA and DOUBLE HONEY RED ALE currently working their way through the brewery.
Our New Bushwakker SUMMER SMOKIN’ SEASONAL MENU is out now! Who knew one of the John Smith beer tanks that late Bushwakker founder, Bev Robertson, brought over from England for his brewpub 35 years ago would one day be repurposed into a massive 800-litre smoker? Bev’s son-in-law, Mike Monette, has been creating some delicious smoked cuisine and will continue to do so all summer long. Defy the “Dewdney Dig” and come try a new dish today! https://bushwakker.com/full-
2025 HOP CIRCUIT! Nice to see so many folks taking advantage of our two bike racks this Hop Circuit season! The most popular Regina Craft Brewery Event is back! Grab your free map and take a hike or your bike and visit all six participating Regina craft breweries. Collect a stamp on your map at all six locations and receive a free 2025 Hop Circuit commemorative glass. This year’s glass is bigger and better than ever!
The construction right in front of YOUR Bushwakker is really getting exciting! So much activity and heavy equipment! You really should come down and see this once-in-a-lifetime excavation project! With the new artist rendering hung in place, you can witness the “before and after” development in real time. No problem visiting us though. Just head over on 8th Avenue and then onto Cornwall Street. You can then park in our new little parking lot and head in through the back entrance. As easy as a summer’s breeze! #defythedig #inconvenientlylocatedondewdney
Our SUMMER CELTIC WEEKEND SPECIAL DINING FEATURE for July 4th & 5th is SMOKED SCOTTISH STEAK DINNER. Our Saturday CLASSIC STEAK & A PINT SPECIAL as well as our Monday and Wednesday WINGS & A PINT SPECIAL and Tuesday PIZZA & A PINT SPECIAL are also great value deals.
JULY PREMIUM WINE FEATURES: This month’s wine features hail from Australia! The Red is JACOB’S CREEK GRENACHE/SHIRAZ and the White is ROSEMOUNT ESTATE TRAMINER RIESLING. Both are $8.95 for a glass and $23.95 for a half litre.
UPCOMING EVENTS
July 4: FIRST FIRKIN FRIDAY – SENSATIONAL SOUR EDITION! Don’t miss this decades-old Bushwakker monthly tradition. A piper from The Regina Police Services Pipes & Drums leads a keg (the firkin) of special ale throughout the pub in a procession. A guest volunteer tapper is selected to wield the handmade wooden maul affectionately named, The Mighty Firkin Wakker, and attempts to tap the keg in one mighty blow! This month we will be delving into the world of SOURS for the very first time! Brewer Michael found a way to get our 35 year old brewery compatible with these puckering pints! Get ready to experience our pilot project…TANGERINE DRAGON FRUIT SOUR! The super special, sour, suds-soaking spectacular takes place at 5:30 PM.
July 5: A SUMMER KICKOFF CEILIDH. We are celebrating the arrival of another sensational Saskatchewan summer Celtic-style! Enjoy Celtic dancing, pipes & drums, a special Celtic firkin tapping and The Tilted Kilts return after a five-year hiatus to deliver some very danceable Celtic music! The event kicks off at 4:00 PM. Tickets $10. Call 306-359-7276 to get yours!
July 7 – 12: SUMMER MEAD RELEASE WEEK. We understand Regina is not a popular winter tourism destination, so when summer rolls around we traditionally make a limited amount of our famous BLACKBERRY MEAD bottles available for our Queen City visitors. For the first time ever this summer we will have our original MORK’S MEAD bottles available too! Add a variety of mead cheesecakes and some mead-inspired food features into the mix and you have the makings for much mead merriment for the masses!
July 7: Monday Night Jazz & Blues. STUMPED! New Regina jazz combo featuring Isiah Edmonston, Morgan Winoski, Eder Garzona and Yohan Yemba. 7:30 PM – 9:00 PM.
July 9: Wednesday Folk Night. HOTDOG! BLUEGRASS. Channelling the spirit of Bill Monroe and the Stanley Brothers, this is the bluegrass fix you didn’t know you needed.7:30 PM – 9:00 PM.
July 11: RIDERS HOST THE STAMPEDERS. Friday night football in Regina! Kickoff is at 7:00 PM which gives you plenty of time to swing by The Bushwakker and park in either of the free parking lots nearby and then take the free 8th Avenue shuttle to and from the game. Enjoy our decadent STAMPEDER BURGER & A PINT special!
Sour Beer
By Vito Delucchi
What is Sour Beer?
There is both a long and a short answer to that question. Let’s start with the short answer, it’s a beer that is made intentionally tart in taste. The long answer, in my opinion, starts in the Senne River Valley area of Belgium. This region produced Lambic, which is what sparked my love of sour beer. In this area of Belgium, local breweries historically cooled their wort in the evening during the colder seasons in a large and awe-inspiring vessel called a Coolship (koelschip)! Rather than pitching yeast into the wort, the ambient local microflora would fall onto the wide surface area of the coolship and provide all the mixed cultures for fermentation. All though Mixed Fermentation undoubtedly predates the Lambic beer renaissance of the Senne River Valley, that’s where a majority of our classic Sour Beer examples originate. Not to take away from the German-born Berliner Weisse, but for me, any discussion around sour beer should start in Belgium.
Regional beer styles aside, what makes a beer intentionally sour? That ambient micro flora those Belgian brewers wrangled contained wild bacteria cultures of Lactobacillus, Pediococcus and Brettanomyces. Primarily, Lactobacillus and Pediococcus are to thank for that mouth puckering acidity. Brettanomyces does add some acidity, but it primarily contributes other flavors and aromas associated with mixed fermentation beers, more so than pure sourness. Left to age for months, and sometimes years, these mixed fermentation beers become the grand cru (pun intended) of the sour beer world. One thing to note about these beer styles is that they have very little hop profile. As you probably know, hops have an anti-bacterial property, and if the beer you plan on souring is above 7 or 8 IBUs, it will greatly inhibit the chance of souring, even with a healthy mixed ferm pitch. Luckily, the hops those Belgian brewers were using are of the Nobel variety and low on Alpha acids. They also tended to store them for a while, further reducing their alpha acids and slightly oxidizing them. Bottom line, no matter what hops you use, keep the IBUs low, ideally below 10.
We now know making an intentionally sour beer requires the addition of a bacteria like Lactobacillus. We also know the traditional way of making them is by using mixed cultures and giving them time to develop their amazingly tart aroma and taste characteristics. But there is another (much quicker) way to produce sour beer by utilizing Lactobacillus prior to fermentation. Now, this is where I need to give some credit to Germany and the aforementioned Berliner Weisse. These beers got their acidity from the naturally present Lactobacillus found on barley. If a mash is kept below the Lactobacillus denaturing point (120°F), and given enough time, the lacto will begin to produce lactic acid. This process is called a sour mash and was a popular method for producing quick turn sour beer prior to brewers figuring out the method of kettle souring. Although these methods can quickly produce a sour beer, they are a little one dimensional due to only having lactic acid. Hence the popularity of adding fruit, or as they do in Germany, flavored syrups.
Mixed Fermentation Sour
To me, producing mixed fermentation beer is one of the most fascinating and enjoyable processes in all of brewing. Depending on your method, it can truly blend art and science to create a harmonious masterpiece. My first mixed fermentation beer was a simple one and if you’re interested in making one yourself, getting started sooner than later is the way to go. Reason being, most mixed fermentation beers take a minimum of 6 months to a year before they even start to become ready to enjoy. Ideally, you want to get them on a schedule so that you’re refilling your vessels for next year as soon as you bottle the previous year’s batches. The reason I say batches “plural” is that the art of mixed fermentation beer lies in the blending. Sure, you can pitch a mixed culture into a single batch of beer and enjoy it once it’s done souring. But having multiple batches with varying cultures not only allows you to become familiar with different strains of bacteria, it allows you to blend them together and come up with something greater than the individuals alone. Or maybe one of them is just so good it should stand on its own, and the others get blended. Either way, I highly recommend getting a few going now if you like mixed fermentation sour beer.
I will give you my mixed ferm base recipe below, but I do want to go into my blending process and some tips on making them in general. On my homebrew system, I am able to produce 20 gallons of wort. Each year, I typically brew one or sometimes two 20-gallon batches worth of wort. I then split them into 5-gallon glass carboys and inoculate them with varying cultures. I recommend starting with a Roselare blend, or something similar like GigaYeast’s Sour Cherry Funk. Then for the others, I will typically mix some brett and lacto strains like Brettanomyces Lambicus and Lactobacillus Delbrueckii with a Saison strain. I also have some 6-gallon Oak Barrels that are part of the blending process, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. After I have 4 or more carboys filled with the various mixed ferms for the year, I stash them away in a dark and temp stable area of my house like a guest bedroom closet. Also, worth noting, I always use S-shaped airlocks as they are less prone to evaporation. Regardless of what you use, check them periodically to make sure they are properly filled. After a while, you will notice a white, almost soap-like cover will begin to develop. This is called a pellicle. They actually become very beautiful (well at least I think so) after a while and look like dome bases on a lunar surface, but I digress. By this point you’re probably over 6 months in, if not longer. Let that pellicle form and resist the urge to pull a sample. Don’t worry, that day will come soon enough. Patience is a virtue.
I typically brew my sour batch in December, so around late October to early November (8 to 9 months later) I will take my first sample. I like to invite over a few friends who appreciate and know sour beer to help with tasting notes. We will typically rank them in order of our favorites and write down some notes on aroma, taste, etc. I then use this information to come up with my blends and pick my lambic base for the year. The one that shines the most in aroma and taste becomes the lambic base and I will bottle that straight unblended. I normally take about 30% of that carboy and bottle it. The rest will get blended into a Gueuze that will include some of the young lambics and some from those aforementioned barrels. The barrels themselves originally got filled from leftover lambic after blending from the previous years. I will do the same thing year after year topping the barrels off each year. After 3 or 4 years, the barrels will typically develop too much acidity and I will retire that one and pick up a fresh barrel. So, the Gueuze blend will have parts of young lambic and parts from the 2-, 3- and even 4-year-old barrels as well. I will then make one or two fruit versions by adding either fresh fruit I picked up during the summer and froze or by using canned fruit purees. I personally love Raspberry (Framboise) and Apricots (Fou’Foun FTW!) but Cherry is another classic style (Kriek) and a great option for flavoring sours. I do all my blending in buckets with measuring lines so I can measure percentages of each batch easily. Definitely worth noting, all of my sour beer equipment i.e. buckets, tubing, etc., I keep separate from my clean beer equipment and I highly recommend that you do the same. Anyway, I then bottle out of the bucket and add a dosage of priming sugar and champagne yeast depending on the style, i.e., no yeast added for Lambic base, but the Gueuze and Fruit blends will get it. If all goes according to plan, I have my glass carboys emptied and my barrels full in time to brew up next year’s mixed ferms. Then those bottles are ready to start enjoying and passing out as gifts for the holidays.
Kettle Sour
Kettle souring is another way to make sour beer and its upside is it can be done very quickly. Another upside is you don’t need to maintain different bottling and packaging equipment since you will be boiling the wort and killing off any bacteria prior to fermentation. It also splits your brew day up over a two- or three-day timeframe which makes it feel like less work, but it’s actually more. The first half of a kettle sour brew day is pretty typical, mash, collect your wort, etc. I then like to boil my wort for 10 to 15 minutes. This accomplishes two things; it drives out the oxygen that’s in solution and it sanitizes the wort. Let’s start with the oxygen, Lactobacillus (the bacteria used to sour) is anaerobic, meaning it does not need oxygen to reproduce like normal brewing yeast. However, bacteria like Acetobacter (think Vinegar) does need oxygen. So, by pre-boiling the wort we are creating a clean and less favorable environment for other bacteria and setting up our Lacto to be the dominant flavor contributor. The challenge that comes from this beneficial step is you need to cool the wort down before pitching your lacto culture, as Lactobacillus starts to denature around 120°F. At home I do this with an immersion chiller, it’s by far the easiest way as you can sanitize it during your boil and easily rinse it off when you’re done. At the brewery, however, I don’t have that luxury, so I recirculate the wort through my plate chiller and back into itself via the whirlpool port. This takes a while since your putting cooled wort back into the hot thermal mass. I found bubbling CO2 through the bottom of the boil kettle helps speed this process up, as it prevents channeling and helps mix the wort as it’s cooled. It also has the benefit of pushing any oxygen out of the headspace of the kettle, which is another step in my process. Once the wort is chilled to my ideal Lacto pitching temp (90-100°F), I will add my lacto culture and then purge and close everything up the best I can. This means using plastic wrap and tinfoil around the kettle lid, etc., to keep the kettle closed off. While I am doing that, I will continue to push CO2 through the bottom of the kettle, essentially creating a nice blanket of CO2 that I am sealing the wort inside of. I personally believe this step is key to creating a clean kettle sour fermentation. So now let’s talk about Lacto cultures, when I first started doing quick sours, I would do sour mashes and use unmilled Pilsner malt to inoculate my mash. I don’t recommend this for kettle sours. Sure, that malt has natural lacto on it, but it probably has some other bacteria as well. One thing I have done that worked well both at home and commercially is use natural yogurt to inoculate my batch. When I have done this method, I will use organic yogurt from a local dairy farm. In their own words, their yogurt is “Crafted with pure, simple ingredients, and minimally processed. No gums, thickeners, stabilizers, artificial ingredients, or coloring agents are ever used in our yogurt.” The listed ingredients reflect this, it’s just pasteurized organic milk and they even list the lacto cultures “LIVING YOGURT CULTURES: A. ACIDOPHILUS, L. BULGARICUS, S. THERMOPHILUS AND BIFIDOBACTERIUM LACTIS” I also have friends who have used Good Belly with great success, which is more readily available. Definitely worth noting, I personally have found that when using yogurt cultures, it comes through in the taste and aroma as opposed to purchasing isolated lacto strains from brewing supply stores like MoreBeer! If you’re looking for the cleanest possible lacto profile, get a pitch from one of the major labs. Either way, once you pitch your bacteria you should have it all buttoned up and purged of oxygen. But it also needs to be kept warm, ideally keep it in that 90-100°F range. At home I do this with some FermWrap heaters and a temp probe inside the thermowell on my kettle connected to a temp controller. I found even when it’s 70 to 80 degrees (here in CA) during the summer it runs the entire time I am souring the wort. So take your ambient temperature and what you need to do to keep that Lacto working into consideration. The lower the temp the longer the souring process will take essentially.
Let’s talk about the souring process. What does that mean? With kettle sours, we are talking a pH reading, I personally like mine around 3.5 to 3.6 pH range, but some people like them even tarter (is that even a word?) like 3.2 to 3.3 pH. You can easily measure this with a pH meter and I would recommend getting one if you plan to kettle sour beers. You can also use pH strips or even try and do it off taste. But when doing it off taste you have to remember the sugars have yet to be fermented so the wort will be very sweet and harder to gauge acidity level on. Assuming you have a healthy lacto pitch, your wort should reach 3.5 in under 24 hours at the ideal temp. Once you hit your desired pH level, you unseal the kettle, take off any heaters etc., and proceed to boil like a normal beer. If you plan to brew multiple kettle sours, or just want to share your Lacto pitch, you can pull off some of the wort before you heat it up and use it to inoculate another batch. It will even keep in the fridge for a few weeks. I do this at the brewery since we’re brewing a kettle sour every few weeks. I will pull off a bbl or two and use it to inoculate the next batch. As long as you’re feeding it (using it) every few weeks, it stays perfectly healthy. The other nice thing about a kettle sour versus a mixed ferm is you can pump them with hops if you want since the lacto fermentation is done before the hop additions. So, no need to adhere to the 10 or lower IBU. Sour IPA? Sure thing, if that floats your boat…go for it!
TIME OUT – Selfish Celtic Love
A Scottish farmer was walking along the boundary between his and his neighbour’s fields when he spotted his neighbour carrying two sheep in his arms.
“MacGregor!” he called. “Are you going to shear those sheep?”
“I am not,” the neighbour replied. “They’re both for me.”
You can’t celebrate the arrival of another Saskatchewan summer without a Celtic Party! Get ready for our July 5th SUMMER CELTIC CEILIDH KICKOFF! The Irish dancers will be stompin’ and the Highland dancers will the twirlin’ and The Tilted Kilts will be rockin’ their Celtic Reels! Tickets $10. Call 306-359-7276. Event runs from 4:00 PM – 9:15 PM.
