Brewing a No-Boil Berliner Weisse

I've wanted to brew a Berliner Weisse for quite some time, and my recent foray into sour beers seemed like a great opportunity to give it a whirl.  I really like the funky lemonade quencher aspect of this beer.  The fact that it is only 2.5-3% alcohol makes it—like all session beers—ideal for homebrewing.  Session beers don't travel well and don't do well sitting on the shelf at the beer store, so the quality differences you get drinking it a week or two out of the bucket in your basement is really noticeable (although I wonder how true that will be with a sour session?).

Also, my wife recently called from her sister's house, raving about Bell's Oarsman and hinting heavily that she would like to see something similar on tap at our house.  The recipe below is based on Kristen England's BWeisse recipe in Brewing with Wheat.  The only thing I've added is a pound of rice hulls, just because I despise stuck mashes.  It's probably not needed.

Mash hopping: feels so wrong, but smells awfully nice.

There a couple of weird things about this recipe.  First and foremost, it's not boiled.  This is fine from a bacterial viewpoint, as the 160+ mashout step gets into the pasteurizing range, but it does feel wrong. Speaking of feeling wrong, this recipe is also mash hopped.  I put an ounce of lovely, whole saatz in there, which made the psychic scars from the Great Hop Shortage of the Late Naughties ache a bit.  I've heard that mash hopping is about as effective as voodoo for getting hop character into the finished beer, but there's a sizeable decoction in the mash program for this, so there is some boiling of hops.  I was relieved to find a faint noble hop aroma in the wort as I was casting out, so maybe it wasn't a waste after all.  We'll see if it persists into the finished beer.


I decided to brew this as a no-sparge recipe.  One of the main reasons I upgraded from my trusty 48 quart mash tun to a 70-quart cooler, is that I wanted to brew 10-gallon batches of low gravity beer with no sparging.  I've heard that you can get a better character because you aren't over-sparging the tiny amount of grains used for session beers.  This also makes it a lot easier for me to brew, as I have only a single kettle.  I use the boil kettle as the HLT, mash as usual, then add a mashout step that adds the rest of the water needed for the recipe.  I need to batch sparge for beers bigger than about 1.050, so then I use the old 48 quart mash tun as an HLT.

Still life, with lacto.

This batch also represents my first attempt to culture bacteria.  After being terrified of bacteria for so many years as a brewer, I was shocked at how difficult it was to culture up the Wyeast Lactobacillus strain.  My mid-70s kitchen (temperature. style-wise, I'd say it's early-50s) wasn't doing anything for it, so I rigged up an incubator by putting it to bed in a cooler with a hot water bottle.  After a week of filling a growler with boiling water 3-times a day for nearly a week, the culture—which was only two weeks old, according to the time stamp—finally started to get a funky, tart smell.  I remember my dad incubating snake eggs using an aquarium heater in a dish of water—we're a hobby-lovin' family—and I may rig something like that up next time. 


I read on a few boards that Wyeast may have picked a fussy strain because other strains may be too difficult to eradicate in the brewery.  Whatever the reason, I've tried to give the Lacto a fighting chance by culturing up a 2 liter starter, then only chilling the beer to 95 and pitching the Lacto.  The Yeast goes in once the beer has cooled naturally to the mid 70s in my still-frigid basement.  I'm also not doing a yeast starter, which shouldn't be needed since the yeast is fresh and the original gravity is only 1.030.  Hopefully I haven't gone overboard—most of these techniques came from the sour freaks over on the Burgundian Babble Belt—but if it's too sour, I'll just take to drinking it with syrups like a real Berliner.  If it's not sour enough after all this effort, I may culture up a he-man, brewery-wrecker strain from a handful of malt next time.

The goal is to put the first keg of this on tap when it's super fresh, and let the second keg sour up in the celler to refresh during the dog days.  

On to the show:

BeerSmith 2 Recipe Printout - http://www.beersmith.com
Recipe: No Boil Berliner Weiss
Brewer: Vince Dongarra
Asst Brewer: 
Style: Berliner Weiss
TYPE: All Grain
Taste: (30.0) 

Recipe Specifications
--------------------------
Boil Size: 11.96 gal
Post Boil Volume: 11.96 gal
Batch Size (fermenter): 11.00 gal   
Bottling Volume: 10.00 gal
Estimated OG: 1.030 SG
Estimated Color: 2.3 SRM
Estimated IBU: 1.5 IBUs
Brewhouse Efficiency: 72.00 %
Est Mash Efficiency: 75.3 %
Boil Time: 0 Minutes

Ingredients:
------------
Amt                   Name                                     %/IBU         
6.00 g                Calcium Chloride (Mash 60.0 mins)        -             
6.00 g                Gypsum (Calcium Sulfate) (Mash 60.0 mins -             
1 lbs                 Rice Hulls (Briess) (0.0 SRM)            7.7 %         
6 lbs                 Pilsner (Weyermann) (1.7 SRM)            46.2 %        
6 lbs                 Wheat Malt, Pale (Weyermann) (2.0 SRM)   46.2 %        
28 g                  Saaz [3.70 %] - Mash 60.0 min            1.5 IBUs      
2.0 pkg               German Ale (Wyeast Labs #1007) [124.21 m -             
1.0 pkg               Lactobacillus Bacteria (White Labs #WLP6 -             


Mash Schedule: Decoction Mash, Single
Total Grain Weight: 13 lbs
----------------------------
Name              Description                             Step Temperat Step Time     
Protein Rest      Add 6.50 gal of water at 142.8 F        133.0 F       60 min        
Mash Step         Add 3.00 gal of water at 198.5 F        152.0 F       15 min        
Mash Step         Decoct 2.60 gal of mash and boil 20 min 166.0 F       1 min         
Mash Step         Add 4.82 gal of water at 178.6 F        170.0 F       40 min        

Sparge: Batch sparge with 1 steps (Drain mash tun, ) of 168.0 F water
Notes:
------ 

Pitched two-week-old lactobacillus packet into 1.9 liters of 1.040 starter wort. No stirplate. Started on kitchen counter, but moved into a cooler, with hot water bottles to keep temp above 80.

Doughed in before coffee, and the water wasn't hot enough. Only hit 122F. Raised to 133 with an infusion, then followed the mash schedule.

Ended up with 1.035, so watered down to 1.030 and raised temp to 160 to pasteurize. Chilled to 95, put into fermenters, and pitched the Lacto. Will add the yeast when temps get down into high 70s.

Kegged the first half straight out of the fermenter, and really enjoyed it.  Tasting notes.



6/3/2012 decided to enter into Dominion Cup.  Will need to figure out  how to bottle a few for the competition.  Will probably put the beer on tap and use a tube to fill the bottles.