Berlin Weiss 2.0 Brew Day

Last year I made a Berliner Weiss by souring the entire volume of wort. I let the wort sit for 20  hours, and it didn't quite get as sharply sour as I was hoping. For this brew I used pretty much the same recipe except that I plan to sour for about three days, starting the souring process on a Monday evening and ending it on a Thursday afternoon. I think also that I'd like to add raspberries to 1 gallon of it. I've heard that the sourness goes well with many fruit. Finally, I don't have US-05 right now so I'll use some of the left over Kolsch yeast I washed a few days ago.

Berliner Weiss 2.0
2.625# German Pilsner Malt
1.5# White Wheat
.25oz American Perle, 3.5% AA, 15 minutes

15 minute boil.

Kolsch yeast. 

Expected OG/FG/IBUs/ABV: 1.031 / 1.008 / 3 / 3.1%

7/1/13
Mashed at 149F for 2 hours, sparged as usual then let wort cool to 118F. in my MLT. "Pitched" a handful of grain and a little bit of steel cut oats at around 10PM. Covered the surface with sanitized aluminum foil and pressed the air bubbles out. Place MLT is the garage, where ambient temps are around 75F.

7/2, 7/3
Removed some wort, boiled for a few minutes and added back in to the MLT in order to keep the temps at around  100F. The wort had a kind of unpleasant smell, like trash or something. But that's normal.

7/4
At 4pm, boiled the wort for 15 minutes, cooled to around 65F, and pitched the washed Kolsch yeast. No starter since this is such a low ABV beer, although I've heard the acidity can inhibit full fermentation to the target FG. So total souring time of around 70 hours. I had a little bit of wort left in the boil kettle. It had a sour aftertaste, but in kind of a weird way. The unfermented wort, in my experience, rarely tastes like the finished beer. 

7/8
The beer is still slowly bubbling, ambient temps at 67F. The yeast had not settled at all, and a thick yeasty krausen is still sitting on top of the beer. Fermentation was never so active as to push any yeast out of the airlock, despite that the Better Bottle only has about 1/2 gallon of head space left.

7/23
Bottled 2 gallons, going for 2.6 volumes of CO2. Put the remainder (about 0.8 gallon) into a 1-gallon jug with 20oz of frozen raspberries that I thawed and squished. By the next day it was slowly bubbling but I couldn't see many bubbles rising through the beer. Many of the white raspberry seeds were floating on top of the beer, but a few occasionally sank.

The regular version was at 1.005 FG, with a definite sourness, and like my last Berliner, a slight trashy smell. I hope that part will go away.