Got Wood?

Decided to add some wood to the lambic. There are several reasons for this; I wanted to give a slightly more authentic environment for the brett which (based on my limited understanding will use some of the wood sugars as part of its life cycle) and also I'm hoping that the brett will make a home in the wood (from which it can venture forth into future brews). The basic idea for using a notched piece of wood to carry over yeast propagation is based on the concept of a "brew stick" used by the vikings and early celtic brewers (Palmer briefly discusses this in his online book How To Brew, and several other books I have touch on the topic). I've been kind of interested in older and strange techniques lately so this seemed like a fun way to add a little adventure to both the current and maybe some future brews.

I had some alder left over from a bunch of scraps that I picked a couple of years ago from a furniture store. Traditionally you'd use beech, but alder is also a relatively mild wood so I thought it would serve for this purpose. I cut several 6" long by 1/2" square pieces then cut a bunch of notches into each piece with a saw about half way through and 1/2"-3/4" inches apart. The notches will add surface area for the yest to (hopefully) infect the wood through and should also help with the rapid emulated aging process.

Since it was "fresh" wood that had never been used for beer (albeit quite dry) I wanted to get most of the flavor out and definitely any residual wood resins. To do this I boiled it in 5 changes of water until it didn't really change the water color after a 30 minute boil (each change was boiled for ~30 minutes). Hopefully this will mellow it to close to the right amount of wood character for the size of batch I'm making and still leave enough surface area for the yeast to take hold. The basic idea was try and simulate several years of leaching and aging in the kitchen in a couple of hours. After boiling it I put it in the oven at 400F for 45m (at which point it was pretty dry looking) and then put it under the broiler (on low),
until it started to smell pretty toasty. It hadn't quite changed color much yet, but was close, this should carmelize a small amount of the wood sugars and add a little bit of interesting character. I quick chilled three of these sticks under cold wate rand then tossed them into the lambic.

We'll be taking a sample in a month or two and see how its going :)