Tasting the Fresh-Kegged No-Boil Berliner Weisse

It's a good thing I brew for domestic consumption, because these multi-adjective descriptions would make for lousy marketing.

Still life with white beer and petunias.

Not very long ago, I brewed a no-boil berliner weisse as part of my plan to continue use of my ancient plastic equipment through brewing of sour beers.  The idea was to keg half of the beer fresh out of the fermenter, and leave the other half in a keg in the basement cellar to further sour until I break it out sometime during the dog days.  I've been drinking the fresh-kegged version for about a week now, and have some thoughts.  

In general, this is a pretty good beer.  It's super light, only about 3% alcohol, and has a nice grainy, just-tart flavor with a super dry finish.  There's also a bit of a funk on the nose from the lacto that I like in some examples of the style.  It's just barely sour, but there's really no sweetness to be balanced, so it comes off as a not-too-tart, unsweetened lemonade.  And it looks like lemonade.  They aren't kidding when they say this stuff is white—the lack of a boil, plus a bit of still-suspended yeast (lacto, starch?) makes it very, very pale.  I'm looking forward to trying the other keg sometime later this summer.  


I'm about half way through this keg, and I have learned some lessons that may help make it a much better beer next time.   

In brewing this, I focused on the health of the lacto and so abused the yeast more than I might usually, and that was a mistake.  I pitched this WYeast German ale strain without a starter into quite warm, unoxygenated wort some time after pitching a huge starter of lacto, which doesn't like oxygen.  As a reward, I ended up with rather large dose of sulfur, which I find happens with some yeasts when they are not treated properly, so I guess this is one of those strains.  In generally, I don't mind a tiny bit of sulfur, especially in a light, thirst-quencher like this, but a lot smells like...well....like sulfur.  Sulfur is pretty volatile, so it dissipates quickly in a highly-carbonated beer like this.  You just don't want to stick your nose in the foam for the first minute or so.  Luckily, when you keg, you can "burp" the keg at the pressure release valve a few times a day, and you can get rid of a lot of the sulfur, so the smell is now down from Blazing Saddles to something you might find in some commercial lagers.  The short of it is that next time I'll pitch a starter and oxygenate, and not worry so much about what it does to the lacto.

This head was not long-lived. Actually running this through a picnic tap to avoid bacteria in the taps.

I'm also a bit disappointed by how cloudy it still is and how the head dissipates so quickly.  The recipe I used involved an hour-long protein rest at 133, and I suspect that may be too long, resulting in a break down of the proteins needed to have good head retention (I also missed low, which might have been the issue).  Of course, for all I know, a good head on a Berliner Weisse not to style, but it does look nice.  The recipe also involved doing a mashout right after the main sacarification rest, which is reached by a decoction.  I suspect that raising the temp to mashout from the sac rest through heating the mash takes long enough to allow the starch released during the decoction to convert.  But I used a boiling water infusion, so I may have denatured the enzymes too quickly, leaving the beer with a starch haze.  Next time I may let it sit for a while before mashing out.

All-in-all, a nice beer to have around.  I'm looking forward to trying to make it better.