Here's a beer a long time in the making. I brewed the base beer for this a year and a half ago as part of a split batch with a Belgian wit. While the wit was fermented with a yeast harvested from some La Trappe Witte, the half which became this was fermented with a wild culture. The grain bill is very pale, with a mix of pale ale malt, wheat malt and unmalted wheat and spelt flakes. Hopping was minimal, only 16 IBU from some Saaz.

I cultured the yeast and bacteria from a handful of uncrushed malt in a starter culture first, then pitched this after confirming that no obvious off-flavours were present. Starter cultures are my preferred method for doing spontaneous fermentations as they allow more control over the conditions and mean that if things go horribly wrong you'll only lose a couple of litres of starter rather than a full batch of beer.

Brewing spontaneously fermented sours is an enterprise that requires a fair bit of patience. Wild yeasts and bacteria are often slow to do their thing and over time the conditions in the beer will favour different species and strains. Most of the time the best thing to do it to stick the fermenter in some corner of the cellar and forget about it for a while. Thus this beer sat largely ignored for a bit over a year before I started thinking about what to do with it.

The beer that emerged was fairly sour, and quite funky, but somehow unremarkable. Because of this I decided to try to liven it up with a bit of fruit. I added 500g of frozen raspberries, defrosted first of course. I then promptly forgot about the beer again for another 5 months while I pursued other, more short-term, brewing projects.

Finally, in January this year, I decided it was about time to bottle.

Appearance

The raspberries have given the beer a fantastic, pink colour while during the long conditioning with bacteria has left it crystal clear. Theres a decent bit of carbonation and it pours with a bright white head. As is often the case with sour beers thoough, the head fades very fast.

Taste & Smell

There's something almost wine-like about this, it reminds me of a Sauvingon Blanc, or perhaps a dry sparkling wine. The flavour is pretty sour, probably through a combination of lactic acid bacteria and malic acid from the fruit. A Brett funk of earthy farmyard provides the base layer to the nose, but the raspberry comes through strongly too. The flavour starts full of raspberries, but this is a bone-dry beer without much sweetness at all. The finish is a bit disappointing, the flavour seems to fade somehow and the lack of body means it doesn't really linger on the palate.

Final Words

This beer is still a bit unexciting in all honesty, it certainly doesn't live up to its stunning looks. Although the raspberries did a lot to liven it up, in the end I'd have preferred it with a more interesting finish. Partly it's probably due to the vagaries of spontaneous fermentation, partly probably due to the grain bill. Perhaps the best solution for the beer would have been to wait to blend it with something else to get the best out of it, but unfortunately I don't have quite enough fermenters to wait for ever for the right candidate to come along.

Vital Details

Batch size: 10l
Expected OG: 1.049
Expected FG: 1.010
Expected ABV: 5.1%
Colour (SRM): 4.3
IBU: 16

Grist:
55.6% (1.25 kg) Pale Ale Malt
22.2% (0.50 kg) Wheat Malt
11.1% (0.25 kg) Flaked Wheat
11.1% (0.25 kg) Flaked Spelt

Hops:
Saaz (30g / 16 IBU) @ 20 min

Yeast:
Wild yeast cultured from malt

It's been 5 months since I brewed this beer and almost a month since I bottled it. I finished off the beer with 55g of Newport a week before bottling. With the gravity finishing off at 1.009, the beer comes in a touch lighter than planned at 3.4% ABV. As such it's very much a light, fresh, summer beer; and with spring just warming up, I seem to have timed this quite well. I was a bit conservative when priming it for bottling, aiming at only 2.8 vol of CO₂, in retrospect I ought probably to have been a bit more aggressive in that regard. The carbonation is slightly lower than I would like it.

Appearance

The beer is a very pale straw colour and almost, but not quite, clear. I'm hoping that a bit more time conditioning in the bottle will allow the bugs to munch up a few more proteins and clear the body up a little bit more. The head is white, and fleeting. This is not hugely surprising as sour beers rarely have a head that sticks around.

Smell

The brett from the De Bom blend comes through well in the nose, with hints of olives, lemons and perhaps a touch of goat. The funk is not overwhelming, though, and gives a nice bit of interest to a beer that I fear might otherwise be a bit bland. The hops added at the end have all but disappeared, with only a hint of hoppy aroma in the nose. Perhaps Newport was just not assertive enough a variety for this.

Taste

The lacto sourness provides a lemony, vinous quality with hints of apple and some grainy character too. The body is rather thin, and higher carbonation would have been a good idea. For my taste it could certainly be more sour as the sourness is quite gentle, more reminiscent of a tart apple juice than a riesling.

Final Words

For a first attempt I'm not too unhappy with how this turned out, but next time I will need to try and get a bit more sourness into the beer. I might try giving the lacto more time to do its thing before adding the yeast, or perhaps I will try to aquire a more aggressive lacto strain through spontaneous fermentation.

This is my first attempt at brewing a Berliner Weisse. Usually when I brew a style for the first time, I try to stick quite close to the style description. This is especially true of a style like Berliner Weisse, which has a bit of a reputation for being difficult to get right. Thus my plan for this brew was to brew a fairly faithful version. My initial recipe plans were slightly altered when instead of pale wheat malt, I accidentally ordered dark wheat malt. This makes for a slightly darker beer (around 5 SRM instead of 3 SRM) than I had intended, though it will still be quite pale. Thus I ended up with a beer made up of 57% dark wheat malt and 43% pilsner malt. The malt bill was a rather small 3.5 kg in total as Berliners are generally very light beers. The plan was for an OG of 1.035.

The mash was rather more complicated than my usual single-infusion affairs. I went for a single-decoction mash, as I expected that the wheat malt would benefit from it. The mash schedule went as follows:

1. Mash in at a lowly 63°C, giving initial mash temperature of 59°C.
2. Remove a third of the mash into a smaller pot, heat that to 65°C.
3. Rest decoction for 15 minutes.
4. Increase temperature of decoction to 73°C
5. Rest decoction for 15 minutes.
6. Bring decoction to the boil, simmer for 10 minutes
7. Return boiling decoction to the main mash, bringing temperature of mash to 64°C
8. Rest the mash for 40 minutes.
9. Mash out at 77°C

As is typical of Berliner Weisse, the hopping was extremely minimal with 40g of Saphir (2.9% AA) thrown into the mash for 30 minutes. This will provide the beer with some hop aroma as well as the micro-biological protection offered by hops but impart minimal bitterness, only about 2 IBU by my calculations. This is a no-boil beer, so I did not bring the wort to the boil at all, but just raised the wort to 82°C for 10 minutes to pasteurise it. Thanks to the lack of evaporation during the boil I ended up with a generous 26 litres of wort at the expected original gravity of 1.035

I went for a combination of three types of microbes, lactobacillus, brettanomyces and Brewer's yeast. Berliner Weisse does not necessarily contain brett, but I've read in various places that brett tends to add extra dimensions to a beer that otherwise can be a bit over-simple and one dimensional. As I wanted to give the slow-moving lacto a bit of a head start, I first pitched a 3-day old starter of Wyeast 5223-PC Lactobacillus Brevis. After about 48 hours, and with the Lacto showing good acivity, I then pitched one some US-05 and Wyeast 3203-PC De Dom. Wyeast's De Dom is a blend of lactobacillus, brettanomyces and brewer's yeast, which I chose primarily because it was half the price of the pure brett cultures that I could get from my brew shop.

Due to the heat-loving nature of lacto, I started out fermentation next to a radiator at a temperature of around 25°C. I will probably move the fermentor somewhere cooler once primary fermentation slows down. I expect that this beer will need a good 2 months at least before I can consider doing anything more with it. Until then I can only listen to the plaintive cries of the air-lock...

Vital Details

Batch size: 26l
Expected OG: 1.035
Expected FG: 1.007
Expected ABV: 3.6%
Colour (SRM): 4.9
IBU: 2

Grist:
57.1% (2.00 kg) Wheat Malt, Dark
42.9% (1.50 kg) Pilsner Malt

Hops:
Saphir (40g / 2 IBU) @ 30 min in mash

Yeast:
Wyeast 5223-PC Lactobacillus Brevis
Wyeast 3203-PC De Dom
Fermentis US-05