Raspberry Berliner Weisse

I've never done a fruit beer before, but I have heard that sour beers tend to go well with fruit, as the acidity accentuates the fruit flavor. This is my first fruit beer, made with a sour-worted Berliner fermented with Kölsch yeast and then racked onto about 18 oz of frozen raspberries (thawed and crushed).

Appearance: It's a darkish pink in color, with a little bit of chill haze, but close to translucent at the bottom of the glass. A light pink and surprisingly persistent but thin head covers the top of the beer. Pretty stunning, really, but then again perhaps that's because the color is so unusual for a beer.

Aroma: Raspberry aroma dominates but it doesn't have any of the sweetness of fresh raspberries. It does have an almost sharp acidity in the smell though. Fortunately I do not get the stanky smell that the non-fruited Berliner has.

Taste: Again, a raspberry taste dominates, but it is not as sweet as the fruit. The beer seems to have gotten more acidic, perhaps because the raspberries contribute their own share of acid but then their sugars ferment away. I wouldn't call this beer harshly acidic, but it could use a touch of sweetness or some added complexity to at least slightly balance the sourness.

Mouthfeel: High carbonation, light body and some tingliness on the tough during the aftertaste. Refreshing.

Overall: An assertively sour Berliner with a strong raspberry smell and a moderate raspberry taste. Almost harshly acidic. Stunning in appearance when poured into my antique Belgian beer glasses.

So I think this experiment produced a good first draft. Although the raspberry comes through quite a bit, to me the sourness is a bit one dimensional, particularly in comparison to a professionally brewed (and blended??) sour plum beer I tasted at a homebrewers' meeting last month. (A bottle of it cost $30.) I have to try this again, either with raspberries or some other fruit.

For next time, perhaps sour-wort for less time, or mash higher to get some residual sweetness, or potentially use some brett for added complexity.





 

Berliner Weisse 2 Tasting

On July 4 I brewed a sour-worted Berliner Weisse, which I had allowed to sour four about 72 hours. I was aiming for a more sour beer than I had last time I used this technique,

Appearance: Golden hazy yellow, with a white head that quickly dissipates.

Aroma: Unfortunately I get a slightly off "trashy" smell from it, with a little bit of lemony tartness mixed in. I hope this smell goes away after a while as it did with my last use of this technique.

Taste: I get a pretty "clean" sourness throughout, especially in the aftertaste. It has a lemony quality, but not mouth puckering like it would be to bite on a lemon. Maybe a little bit of pilsner grain taste or very slight sweetnes in there, but the sour dominates.

Mouthfeel: Pretty thin due to the low gravity. I don't think it is quite as effervescent as my last one, so it doesn't have the enhanced mouthfeel that can come from high carbonation in a low gravity beer.

Overall: A light, refreshing, and moderately sour Berliner Weiss that probably should be more sour and more highly carbonated. Overall, I don't think it's much different than my last try at this style using the same sour-wort technique. Perhaps next time I'll sour longer, or maybe try the technique of adding lacto to the fermentation.


Other: I recently went with my with to Northern Germany, where her family lives, and took along a bottle of this beer. Her family generally do not drink Berliner Weiss, but they said it was pretty sour, and generally OK. However, they emphasized that the style is pretty much always consumed with sweet Woodruff or Raspberry syrups, in a shallow challice, stirred up a bit to get a nice thick head, and drunk through a straw. (Beer through a straw?!)

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. 

Berliner Weisse Tasting

A few weeks ago I made my first sour beer, Ich bin ein Berliner Weisse, by sour-worting for about 20 hours, followed by a 15 minute boil. The sour-worting technique avoids the long aging times necessary for the "bugs" to do their thing, but can be an unpredictable process because the conditions of the sour wort and the growth rate of the microorganisms can be hard to control.

Appearance: Hazy straw yellow. White head with small bubbles that disappear quickly but leave a white lacing around the side of the glass.

Aroma: Lemony, with some sourness and a hint of funkiness - not putrid exactly but a slight whiff of trashy smell.

Taste: Mildly sour. Not puckering by any means. No bitterness. The funky weirdness of the smell is not present in the taste. Not a complex taste.

Body: Spritzy due to the carbonation of about 3 volumes. A bit tingly on the the tounge, again because of the high carbonation and low gravity.

Overall:  A mildy sour, lemony beer with light body. Refreshing and drinkable. Slight funkiness, so not a completely "clean" sour flavor. Overall pleasant but not a strongly flavored beer. Good refreshing summer beer.

For Next Time: Longer sour mash to get a much more prominent sour smell and taste. Perhaps inoculate the wort with a commercial tube of Lactobacillus. The sour mash of only 12 - 24 hours, though recommended as a good starting point, has not in this case produced a very sour beer (to my palette), certainly not compared to the reference beer I used, Bell's Oarsman (which BTW is itself only considered mildly sour).

Update: As of August 31, the slightly trashy smell is no longer present. I'm not sure why or how. I am really seeing the value of aging homebrew at least 5-6 weeks before drinking it, as many harsh or weird flavors seem to disappear as the bear ages. 

Sour Wort Berliner Weisse

I have wanted to try to make a sour or funky beer for a while. Most of the sour beer recipes in Brewing Classic Styles and on The Mad Fermentationist call for at least a year of aging because the "bugs" do not work as quickly as beer yeast to consume the sugars in the beer. For a number of reasons the requirement of allowing most sour beers to age for a really long time has not allowed me to brew those styles, although that has recently changed. Still, I want to try the easiest method for getting a sour beer before attempting a sour that needs to have a lengthy aging period.

With a sour mash technique to impart the requisite acidity of a Berliner Weisse it is not necessary to store the beer a long time. As I understand it the basic idea behind the sour mash is to perform a regular mash, raise to 170F, then either 1) allow the beer to cool to between 115F - 120F or 2) sparge, collect the desired amount of wort, and cool to between 115F - 120F At that point, a handful of grain can be tossed in the mash or wort, inoculating it with Lactobacillus bacteria that, over the course of anywhere from a few hours to a few days, will turn the wort sour. Eventually it should have a "clean" sour smell like a sourdough starter for bread. But the process is variable since you never know what "bugs" will end up in the mash. If the mash smells putrid, vomitty or fecal then something other than Lactobacillus is present.

Once the souring is complete the wort can be boiled to kill the souring bugs and fix the level of sourness. Regular yeast can be used to ferment the remainder of the beer. 

So this beer is a bit of an experiment since I might pick up some bad bugs during the sour mash. If so, I can discard the mash if it smells really terrible or see if the foul smells can be boiled away to get a cleaner beer. I would prefer to just go from grain to glass, tossing only if the end product is really terrible. At least it's a cheap recipe.

How much of the mash or wort to sour? Dave Green of Brew Your Own recommends souring only part of it unless a very sour flavor is desired. Brewing Classic Styles suggests that the whole wort can be soured for an assertive sourness characteristic of the style. The blog Brain Sparging on Brewing suggests a partial sour mash unless you want the beer really sour. I did see somewhere a suggestion to sour the whole mash for a Berliner Weisse here but some feedback on that thread indicated that the very low pH of a soured wort requires a TON of yeast to ferment properly. Well I'll pitch an entire packet of US-05. I hope that's enough.

So I've seen differences of opinions. Ten brewers, fifteen different methods....

What I will try is the full wort method, souring by tossing into the wort 4oz of grain. This is experimental. Perhaps the best way to find what works is simply to experiment, see what the results are, etc... Think of this blog entry as the notes to an experiment.

Ich bin ein Berliner Weisse
Volume: 3 gallons

2.5 lbs Belgian Pilsner
1.0 lbs Weyerman Pale Wheat
(0.25oz extra grain as an innoculant) 

Mash at 149F for 75 mins, or until iodine test indicates complete conversion.

0.5 oz Hallertau pellets, 3.9%AA - 15mins  - 7 IBU's

Boil Time: 15 mins

Expected OG: 1.031
Expected FG: 1.008
Expected ABV: 3.1%

Yeast: Safale US-05

------

The Mash

7/3/12
4:12pm
Preheated cooler with 1.1 gallons brewing water at 165F or so. Dough-in when water was at 160F. Hit my mash temp almost exactly - mash was at 150F after 15mins of mash. Reserved the extra 4oz grain for later use.  At 5:10pm, mash was at 148F. Started heating mash-out and sparge water. 

5:25pm
Added .9 gallons of mash-out water at boiling.  After a brief stir the mash was right on target at 167F - 168F. Yay!

5:35pm
Actual mash temp was 165F. Not bad. Recirculated 4 qts., collected 1.6 gallons first runnings.

5:40pm
Added sparge water at 170F. Stirred gently. Actual mash temp was 166F. Started boil of grain bag and a marble to sanitize.

5:50pm
Recirculated and collect 2nd runnings. Ended up with almost exactly 3 gallons in my bottling bucket. Cleaned out my MLT, then transferred the wort into the the cooler so that its temperature is relatively stable over the souring period. Took a small sample of wort for the hydrometer. Temperature of the wort in the cooler was 145F. Left outside without the top of the cooler. Wait for wort to cool to 125F or so before inoculating with grain.....

6:49pm

Wort plus inoculant, covered with foil.

Wort was at about 132F. Hydrometer reading said I got 1.031 pre-boil OG. This equates to 71.8% efficiency. In the typical range of 68% - 72% when I do a batch sparge the right way.

7:03pm
Wort was at 128F. Will inoculate soon. Apparently the Lactobacillus cannot survive about 131F, but the by adding the grain the temp of the wort will drop. Still, I want to be sure that the nice little bugs survive.

7:15pm
Wort was at 128F still. Added unmashed grains to the sanitized bag with marble. Gently placed into the wort. The grains sank. Placed sanitized aluminum foil over the wort and put the top back on the cooler. Temperature reading (with sanitized thermometer) was 126F. Perfect!

Now, the suspense! Will it smell cleanly sour? Will it smell like vomit? Stay tuned......

7/4/12
10:00am
Wort was at about 100F. Smell was slightly sour but not assertively so. A few krausen bubbles had formed under the foil Taste was also a bit sour but not puckering. Actually rather pleasant - a kind of sweet and sour mix. I want a nice, assertive sourness. Pulled about two cups of wort, heated on stove to boiling, and added back. A few minutes later the temp was only 105F.

10:10am
Pull about a quart, heated to boil, added back. At 10:20am the wort was at 115F. The wort has been souring for 15 hours.

1:10pm
Wort was at 108F. Smelled cleanly sweet-sour but not strongly so. 

3:00pm
Tasted a very small sample of the wort. It tasted sour to me. And smelled sour. About 20 hours after inoculation. Transferred wort to boil kettle. Wife thought it smelled sour too. Proceed as per normal brew day.....

3:45pm
Wort was around 95F when my chiller could cool it no further (at least without using a huge amount of water.) Transferred to 3-gallon better bottle, placed in basement of 67F ambient air.

8:35pm
Pitched dry yeast into 70F wort. Better Bottle was in 62F water. Followed directions on yeast packet - simply sprinkled it on top of the wort. I then shook the carboy to distribute the yeast and aerate a little bit.

7/5/12, 11am
Krausen forming. The beer is in a tub of 66F water.

7/612, 8:45am
High krausen has passed. Airlock no longer bubbling. That was a fast fermentation.