Foeder Pale Sour – Lark Barrel 2026

About This Beer

A pale, oak-aged sour built for the long game in an ex-Lark Distillery barrel from Dave Bell at Garage Project’s Wild Workshop. The barrel is neutral oak with very little spirit character, so the wood is a home for the culture rather than a flavour in its own right. The goal is a clean, bright, Rua-style foeder pale sour: soft acidity, gentle funk, and a continental-pilsner backbone that lets the culture lead.

The barrel is inoculated once, at the first fill, with a 375mL bottle of live culture pulled straight from Garage Project’s 8000L Rua foeder. That culture carries the house mix of Saccharomyces, Brettanomyces and lactic bacteria that gives Rua its character, and it has 12 to 18 months in the wood to make this beer its own.

This page is the whole 2026 barrel — every batch brewed to fill it, totalled up. Three of the four fill rounds are in the wood and aging; the final top-up batch is fermenting now, and tasting notes will follow once the culture has had time to work.

Five Brews, Eight Cubes, One Barrel

The barrel was filled from a run of five separate brews spread across two months — three double batches of roughly 46L and two single batches of roughly 23L, for eight ~23L cubes in total. One of those cubes was diverted early, before the barrel arrived, and pitched onto Paul Fantham’s 5 Magics + muscat grape wild culture rather than held indefinitely. That leaves seven cubes — around 161L of wort — for the barrel.

The ingredient figures on this page are the totals for those seven barrel cubes, not any single brew day: 38.5 kg of grain and 73.5 g of hops across the whole fill. Every cube is the same 5.5 kg grist and the same clean 60-minute bittering charge, so the barrel is one consistent beer built in instalments. The parent recipe and the first cubes are documented on the Foeder Pale Sour I page.

The Barrel and the Culture

This is the first fill of a barrel that should run for years. Filling it cleanly matters more than any single ingredient.

First: ferment the beer before it goes into the barrel, not in it. Running a full primary fermentation inside the barrel would leave a thick yeast bed sitting in the wood for weeks, and that risks autolysis, the savoury, marmite-like off-flavours that come from yeast breaking down. So every round is fermented out in a 60L all-rounder first, and only mostly-clear beer is moved across.

Second: fill the barrel like a keg. The barrel is purged with CO2 before each fill and the headspace is purged again afterwards, so the beer never sits on a cushion of air. Because each round is transferred just shy of fully finished, it keeps throwing a little CO2 inside the barrel, which scrubs out any stray oxygen and keeps the whole thing positive while the next rounds are brewed.

The Method

The barrel is filled in four rounds, each fermented in the 60L all-rounder with Lallemand BRY-97 — a clean, cold-tolerant ale strain that secures the beer quickly even in a cold winter garage. When a round reaches terminal gravity, it is closed-transferred under CO2 into the purged barrel, and the next round is pitched straight onto the same yeast cake, so a single pitch of yeast carried the first three rounds with no extra yeast needed. The seven cubes group into the rounds like this:

• Round 1 — two cubes (~44L), inoculated at this first fill with the 375mL of live Rua.
• Round 2 — two cubes, pitched onto the round-one cake.
• Round 3 — two cubes: the single held Batch-1 cube plus the first single batch, both onto the same cake for a third time, run a touch cooler and finished more fully.
• Round 4 — one single-batch cube on a fresh BRY-97 pitch, brewed to brim the barrel and bank an airlocked reserve. In progress.

The final round was left to finish fully before transfer, since it is meant to fill the barrel to the brim with no room for an active fermentation to push over.

The Wort

The grist is built for long conditioning with a mixed culture. A continental-pilsner base, mostly heritage Barke, gives a soft, full malt backbone, with Weyermann wheat malt for body and head structure and a portion of rolled oats for a silky mouthfeel that survives long attenuation. Each cube is the same 5.5 kg build — 3.65 kg base, 1.35 kg wheat, 0.5 kg oats — brewed no-chill, run hot straight into sealed cubes, and held until its fermentation round comes up.

Two substitutions crept in across the run and are worth recording. The base malt started as 7.3 kg Weyermann Barke on the early cubes; a stock shortage mid-run meant two later cubes ran 6.1 kg Barke topped up with 1.2 kg standard Weyermann Pilsner, and one single cube used Weyermann Pilsner as its whole base — the same soft continental-pils character either way. The hop started as Pacific Jade and switched to Simcoe on the later cubes as a straight one-for-one substitute. At 60 minutes for bittering only, at around 15 IBU, the variety barely matters, so both sit happily in the same barrel.

Status

Three of the four rounds are in the wood. Each was transferred clean under CO2, finishing at a combined 1.010 FG (1.057 OG, ~6.2% ABV) measured across the rounds on a single RAPT Pill. Round one fermented out in the all-rounder and was closed-transferred in mid-June, inoculated at that first fill with the 375mL of live Rua. Round two was pitched straight onto the round-one yeast cake, took off faster than any fermentation here ever has, and went across as soon as it hit terminal gravity. Round three — the final two cubes on the same cake for a third time, run a touch cooler — was left to finish fully and transferred on 26 June, with the sanitised line held below the beer surface to keep the fill quiet and low in oxygen.

The surprise was the barrel itself. It was thought to be a 115L barrel, but it drank all three rounds — roughly 125L of clean beer — and still had headroom to spare. That makes it a true quarter-cask closer to 130L, so the 10 to 15L reserve that was meant to be held back for top-ups never materialised; every drop went in. The fourth round — a single ~23L batch brewed on 13 July back on the original Barke base — is fermenting now on a fresh pitch of BRY-97, to fill the barrel to the brim and finally bank that reserve. The brew day went cleanly; it came in a touch stronger than the earlier rounds (OG 1.061 against ~1.057) and a shade under on volume, neither of which matters under a year-plus of barrel age. Once it is in, the plan lands at roughly 125L in the barrel plus a ~15L reserve keg — about 140L of clean beer from the seven cubes after trub losses. (These final volumes are still estimates and will be updated once the round-four transfer is done.)

A little egg-like sulphur came off the barrel as it filled — the same benign fermentation sulphur seen earlier in the fill, expected to gas off and irrelevant under a year-plus of mixed culture. The simple pin in the bung has been swapped for a bubbler, for a clearer view of activity and a touch more protection against oxygen creeping in.

Once it is topped up, the barrel will be left to age for a minimum of 12 months, with a target of 18, sampled every three to four months and tracked toward a finished pH of 3.0 to 3.3.