OK, cheesiness aside, I recently bought 2 packs of Wyeast's Berliner Weisse blend packs that were expiring, so I got them at a good deal. It was purely an impulsive act, alas. I had (and still have) no idea how a Berliner Weisse tastes like. Here goes!
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| A very pale, very "raw" looking un-boiled wort used for the Berliner Weisse |
I searched online, and it seems that Berliner Weisse tends to have quite a polarised audience. You either love it ("refreshing", "Champagne of the North", "can't get enough of it") or hate it to the core ("cringe", "puckering", "vomit"). And as luck would also have it, no one seems to have come to a consensus on how to brew it! Here's a summary of what I've gathered so far:
Some people do a sour mash, where wort is first innoculated with Lactobacillus and left to incubate at elevated temps (40C or so), until the desired acidity develops. This Lacto can be from a pure culture, or simply by throwing in a handful of unmilled raw grains. Then it is boiled to kill off the Lacto, hopped, and fermented with a "regular" ale or lager yeast. Some people sour 100% of their mash, while some sour only a portion (maybe 10-20%) of it before blending the soured portion back in. The 100% sour seems more straight-forward, but the problem is that if the acidity is allowed to over-run, the subsequent pitching of "regular" yeast can have significant difficulty with doing a vigorous fermentation due to the low pH. Also, you'd require quite a large vessel to sour 100% of the mash. It also allows for less room for error, since you don't get to blend it later on.
In doing a sour mash, you'd try to emulate conditions that favour Lactobacillus while retarding other microbes - this involves an elevated incubation temperature (we're talking about 40-44C here) and anaerobic conditions, since Lacto is mainly anaerobic or microaerophilic. Lacto is really an awful bacterium to work with. It's finicky. I've seen it being called "the pussy bacteria" on a forum. It gets out-competed under aerobic conditions, it produces lactic acid but dies when it becomes too acidic (at least, L.delbrueckii is reported to be a pussy) or if too much alcohol is present, and it is exquisitely sensitive to hop compounds.
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The other method that I've read about involves pitching a mixed culture (such as the Wyeast/White labs blends) straight into the wort, and then hope for the best. From what's been reported however, it seems that this method requires a long wait, and even then you may not get the kind of acidity that is desired. (The yeast in these blends will probably chew through most of the sugar available + produce quite a bit of alcohol to impede the Lacto).
And to further confuse things (me), some people boil the wort, some do a no-boil method.
I gave up. I'm going to do it my way, haha. I decided to do an aggregate of most the above, so that there's something to compare with.
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| Pils and what on left, with acidulated in a separate bowl on the right. Ignore the chocolate malt behind (I was doing a back-to-back brew - what a fantastic Sunday!!) |
Berliner Weisse - Base Recipe (28 litres)
Pils malt - 3kg
Wheat malt - 1.6kg
Acidulated malt - 0.25kg (added in last 15 mins)
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| A quick and easy decoction |
A single decoction mash was done for this recipe. The milled grains were doughed in at 62C, and a thick slurry was removed and boiled for 15 minutes before returning to the mash tun. The rest of conversion occured at a mash temp of 68C for 1 hour. The acid malt was only added in the last 15 minutes, as I didn't want to risk affecting the conversion efficiency. I decided on the acid malt to add just a wee bit of lactic acidity to help the Lacto along. I planned for a 28 litre batch in order to be able to split the batch for different fermentation routines. The wort temp was subsequently raised to 75C for a mash-out.
Batch 1 - the sour mash Weisse
17 litres of the wort was transferred while very hot into a regular Corny keg which had been sanitised. I decided that a keg would be the ideal candidate for a sour mash vessel - it's easy to taste along the way, you can purge it with CO2, and since it's covered, my wife & family won't flay me due to the smell of a Lacto ferment. Unfortunately there's no way I can heat it up to 40C with any reliability though, but that's a trade-off I'm willing to take. Plus, I have a dedicated "wild" keg sitting around for my usual nasties.
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| Some L.acidophilus, just for good measure! |
After the keg has cooled slightly, the headspace was vented and fresh CO2 pumped in to purge it of O2.
This keg was left to cool to room temp (30C) overnight. The following morning (just before I rushed off to work), I dumped in a handful of raw unmilled grains using a tea bag. I also added the contents of 3 capsules of L.acidophilus for good measure. Once again, the headspace was purged using CO2. This was left outdoors where it would receive late afternoon sunlight, which hopefully will warm it up to the 40s. I'm probably going to taste it in a few days' time. Once it gets sour enough I'll rack it out back into the kettle, boil it with a small charge of hops, before cooling and pitching with the remaining packet of Wyeast 3191 blend.
Batch 2 - the no-boil, 1-step Weisse
The remaining 10+ litres of wort was transferred into a sanitised HDPE cube, which was allowed to cool to 30C overnight. As this is a no-boil batch, I had to get some hops in there somehow, both to prevent spoilage and also to make it qualify as a beer lol. I took 7g of Hallertau mittefruh hops, added some boiling water, microwaved it to make hot tea and strained it before adding the hop juice into the cube. A smack pack of Wyeast 3191 (Berliner Weisse blend) was then pitched directly into the cube, with no agitation at all. I did not bother to purge the head space of CO2, since oxygen diffusion through the plastic would be quite significant anyway. (OK, I was lazy.) I'm planning to let this one sit out for months, tasting it along the way.
We'll see how they both turn out! Hopefully I'll have interesting stuff to report. Come think of it now ... I'm scared. If I stop blogging, then I may really have been poisoned by some of this stuff.
Updates
Update #1 - 6 Oct 2013
Update #2 - 21 Oct 2013
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