The End of the Beginning of the Never Ending Project

Forgive me, internet, for I have sinned. It has been far too long since my last post and I am ashamed that I have once again fallen into the trap with so many of my well intentioned fellow story tellers: paying for a website I only use once in a solar eclipse. Hopefully, I will do better from here on out.
About the title: That is confusing even to me. Here’s the deal: there is a process used primarily in the production of Port (the fortified wine) called the Solera process. Essentially, a barrel is filled with three different vintages and then when the next vintage comes along, a third of the volume is packaged and replaced with fresh product. This process is repeated basically in perpetuity.
There is a style of beer called a Gueuze which is a blend of multiple years of Lambic. (Now, I’m going to be a naughty brewer and use those terms to describe the sour beer I am making even though I am not in the part of Bruxelles that one has to be in in order to make actual Lambic and Gueuze. So, I’ll put quotes around them when I’m referring to my beer.) A Gueuze is usually very carefully blended by people who specialize in this kind of thing. They also have multiple 60+ gallon barrels to choose from and thus have a much broader palette with which they are working. At the moment, I am brewing 5 gallon batches of beer so I don’t have the quantity that would traditionally be used for proper blending.
But I do want to try interesting new things and so when I was watching a documentary on the production of Port, I decided it would be interesting to do a Solera style “Gueuze”. Two years ago, I brewed a batch of “Lambic” which has been sitting in a glass fermenter. Last year, I brewed another batch which has been sitting in a different glass fermenter. They have been waiting patiently to become one with a third batch which I will brew this month.
Today, I purchased a new, toasted, 15 gallon Hungarian oak barrel which will hold the three “Lambic” vintages for a year. At the end of the year, I will rack off 5 gallons of “Gueuze” and replace it with fresh “Lambic”. All of the current batches will be fermented with a commercial blend of yeast and bacteria but starting with the first batch after the first bottling, I am going to (hopefully) replace the packaged beer with “Lambic” that is inoculated using the tiny Koelschip (I call it the Koeldinghy) I made a couple of years ago (a Koelschip is an open, shallow vessel used to inoculate wort with ambient yeast and bacteria).
So, here’s to the end of the beginning of the never ending project.