Preface: Most of his post was written long before SOURFEST took place. To my delight this beer took first place in the home brew category in Ireland and overall.
..aka Imperial Berliner with Raspberries... aka...
During our trip to Belgium for Toer de Geuze, and in particular our two fantastic days spent at Boon Brewery, my wife developed quite an unexpected penchant for framboise. I like framboise myself, but if I'm going to have a lambic based fruit beer I'll usually opt for kriek. I'm a big fan of cherries ever since my mother gave me my first slice of black forest gateau as a kid.
At July's BrewCamp we dissected Siren's Calypso. When I say dissected, we didn't really as no-one thought to bring anything apart from a pH meter, so aside from pH we went away knowing very little about it apart from that it tastes very nice, and the pH of our bottle was 3.6! Going on the batch number (377) the Siren website says it was dry hopped with Mosaic, which was unexpected. I would have said Citra.
So this brew started out as a half-assed attempt at cloning Calypso but by co-incidence turned into one of the nicest brews I've made, and that's according to my wife! This was purely as the opportunity arose (unexpectedly) to acquire a reasonable quantity and variety of frozen fruits from a wholesaler, raspberries included! [I have since discovered that Aldi are selling 300g tubs of frozen raspberries at €1.59, working out at €5.30/kg. This is quite competitive, and is probably perfect for the amateur brewer.]
19 litre batch:
..aka Imperial Berliner with Raspberries... aka...
During our trip to Belgium for Toer de Geuze, and in particular our two fantastic days spent at Boon Brewery, my wife developed quite an unexpected penchant for framboise. I like framboise myself, but if I'm going to have a lambic based fruit beer I'll usually opt for kriek. I'm a big fan of cherries ever since my mother gave me my first slice of black forest gateau as a kid.
At July's BrewCamp we dissected Siren's Calypso. When I say dissected, we didn't really as no-one thought to bring anything apart from a pH meter, so aside from pH we went away knowing very little about it apart from that it tastes very nice, and the pH of our bottle was 3.6! Going on the batch number (377) the Siren website says it was dry hopped with Mosaic, which was unexpected. I would have said Citra.
So this brew started out as a half-assed attempt at cloning Calypso but by co-incidence turned into one of the nicest brews I've made, and that's according to my wife! This was purely as the opportunity arose (unexpectedly) to acquire a reasonable quantity and variety of frozen fruits from a wholesaler, raspberries included! [I have since discovered that Aldi are selling 300g tubs of frozen raspberries at €1.59, working out at €5.30/kg. This is quite competitive, and is probably perfect for the amateur brewer.]
19 litre batch:
| Amount | Item | Type | % or IBU |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4.00 kg | MCI Lager Malt (3.9 EBC) | Grain | 78.33 % |
| 1.30 kg | Bairds White Wheat Malt (4.7 EBC) | Grain | 21.67 % |
| Est OG: 1.067 SG | Measured OG: 1.052 SG (1.066 pre lacto) |
| Est FG: 1.010 SG | Measured FG: 1.012 SG |
| Estimated ABV: 7.53 %** | Actual ABV: 4.95 % |
I had intended on keeping the 2:1 ratio of barley malt to wheat malt, keeping to the traditional Berliner quantities, but I simply ran out of wheat malt on the day. Not a biggie and certainly did no harm to the beer. The only hopping at this point was a small handful of really old hops into the grist.
One thing I have started doing since I started using lacto is pH adjusting everything, and having weighed up all my options my weapon of choice is citric acid. Why? It's readily available and inexpensive in the Asian food store Eurasia in Fonthill, it's very food safe, and while it does have a flavour it is complementary to this type of brew. And a little goes a very long way!
For this brew my evil Leixlip water started out at almost pH 8.0 which I adjusted down to 5.2 with 6g of citric acid. The mash itself will act as a buffer and the pH shouldn't drop any more, and in this case the pH of the 75 minute mash itself settled out at 5.4. I ran a couple of litres short on sparge water, so the final couple of litres were untreated.
After a one hour boil I pH adjusted again with citric acid, this time down to a pH of 4.4. When I'm kettle souring I adjust to roughly 1.0 above where I want the final brew to be, because it just tastes good, and it works very well. There is also the school of thought that starting the lacto off at a low pH prevents it from breaking down head retaining proteins. I don't know if that's true, but I have found that the head retention is generally medium to poor on these types of brew. Anyway I pitched a L. brevis starter I made a couple of days earlier from wort with White Labs WLP-672, and in the whole lot went to my fermenting fridge at 30°C. One thing that struck me about the starter is that it didn't look quite right to me as it was a little frothy. Lacto produces no gas worth talking about and no krausen, so apart from the pH steadily dropping there is no other real sign of lacto activity. I've opted for L. brevis as my lacto of choice, sort of, as in a few side-by-side tests I've done at home it has produced better results than L. delbreuckii which seems a little tame in comparison. Brevis has been able to drop the pH to 2.9 for me, given enough time. That's impressive! [Edit: as of 20/11/15 I've stopped using WL bacteria altogether due to suspected yeast contamination of the vials]
24 hours later the pH was down to 3.6, and after 36 hours it was down to 3.3. Worryingly though there was quite a lot of "froth" on the surface, which looked a lot to me like a yeast krausen. I have read online about some White Labs lacto vials being contaminated with yeast, and while I'll never know the source I'm pretty sure either something they did or something I did introduced a slow moving yeast as the gravity had dropped from 1.066 to 1.052 (at that temperature a brewer's yeast would rip through that and probably be close to terminal gravity). Again lacto should have no noticeable effect on gravity as the lactic acid produced is 1.2 times denser than water, so there was definitely something in there. But as Tom in Galway Bay says, it's all about the taste, and whatever was in there it was nice and lemony bitter.
Another 30 minute boil to kill the lacto (and yeast) off, and bring the total boil time to 90 mins as I find lager malt inevitably causes DMS, and then the wort went into a carboy with some freshly rinsed WLP-644 from Quare Good IPA. I had made sure to aerate well as I wanted to give 644 every opportunity to produce acetic acid, as I've found a combination of acids boosts the complexity and quality of the finished beer. The aroma from the boil was wonderfully appley and bready, and the house smelled like someone was baking apple pie, something I have observed a few times now, but I don't know the reason. A neighbour called to the door to borrow a hole saw, and asked was my wife baking apple tarts! I've still not had a good explanation for that one. Anyway 644 is not the fastest mover but it's my new favourite fruity yeasts for light beers, and it dropped the gravity to 1.015 after about a week. The taste was lemony bitter and there was a tiny hint of DMS, which I was slightly disappointed about after 90 minutes of boiling.
Then the raspberries arrived.
Up until this point it had been on course to land in the Calypso clone ballpark, but I decided "fook it, it's going to be a raspberry sour", and in went 2.1Kg. The Food Safety Authority of Ireland is advising all imported frozen berries be boiled due to outbreaks of norovirus in Scandanavia, linked to Serbian raspberries. Mine were German in origin but I hadn't seen this warning in time either way. It could be potentially horrifying if any professional brewery released a commercial beer with fruit that caused that level of illness.
2.1kg gave a ratio of about 1kg of rasperberries to 8 litres of beer.
The beautiful colour was imparted within a couple of days but unlike previous lambic projects with raspberries they never completely lost their colour, I supposed probably because they weren't left long enough.
While the addition of frozen fruit crashed the temperature and stopped airlock activity for a day or so, it started up again shortly after and ceased again about 2.5 weeks later, leaving a steady FG of 1.012. Probably a little higher than I was expecting as 644 has been super attenuative for me before, but I decided not to risk bottle bombs and keg instead. While safer the beer needed to be run through a sieve on it's way to the keg where it was chilled overnight and force carbed "the sodastream way" to around 2.5 vols. Raspberry bits block dip tubes, so this had to be put into the keg via a filter. The photo below shows the first glass out the kegs which was naturally quite cloudy.
Quare Good IPA took several weeks in the keg to clear completely, but clear it did, and this brew did the same.
One thing I have started doing since I started using lacto is pH adjusting everything, and having weighed up all my options my weapon of choice is citric acid. Why? It's readily available and inexpensive in the Asian food store Eurasia in Fonthill, it's very food safe, and while it does have a flavour it is complementary to this type of brew. And a little goes a very long way!
 |
| Brown Paper Bag's Howrye is a great beer. I had one when I finished brewing. Nice. |
After a one hour boil I pH adjusted again with citric acid, this time down to a pH of 4.4. When I'm kettle souring I adjust to roughly 1.0 above where I want the final brew to be, because it just tastes good, and it works very well. There is also the school of thought that starting the lacto off at a low pH prevents it from breaking down head retaining proteins. I don't know if that's true, but I have found that the head retention is generally medium to poor on these types of brew. Anyway I pitched a L. brevis starter I made a couple of days earlier from wort with White Labs WLP-672, and in the whole lot went to my fermenting fridge at 30°C. One thing that struck me about the starter is that it didn't look quite right to me as it was a little frothy. Lacto produces no gas worth talking about and no krausen, so apart from the pH steadily dropping there is no other real sign of lacto activity. I've opted for L. brevis as my lacto of choice, sort of, as in a few side-by-side tests I've done at home it has produced better results than L. delbreuckii which seems a little tame in comparison. Brevis has been able to drop the pH to 2.9 for me, given enough time. That's impressive! [Edit: as of 20/11/15 I've stopped using WL bacteria altogether due to suspected yeast contamination of the vials]
 |
| pH 3.3: Yeah Baby |
Another 30 minute boil to kill the lacto (and yeast) off, and bring the total boil time to 90 mins as I find lager malt inevitably causes DMS, and then the wort went into a carboy with some freshly rinsed WLP-644 from Quare Good IPA. I had made sure to aerate well as I wanted to give 644 every opportunity to produce acetic acid, as I've found a combination of acids boosts the complexity and quality of the finished beer. The aroma from the boil was wonderfully appley and bready, and the house smelled like someone was baking apple pie, something I have observed a few times now, but I don't know the reason. A neighbour called to the door to borrow a hole saw, and asked was my wife baking apple tarts! I've still not had a good explanation for that one. Anyway 644 is not the fastest mover but it's my new favourite fruity yeasts for light beers, and it dropped the gravity to 1.015 after about a week. The taste was lemony bitter and there was a tiny hint of DMS, which I was slightly disappointed about after 90 minutes of boiling.
 |
| 2.1 kg of goodness |
Up until this point it had been on course to land in the Calypso clone ballpark, but I decided "fook it, it's going to be a raspberry sour", and in went 2.1Kg. The Food Safety Authority of Ireland is advising all imported frozen berries be boiled due to outbreaks of norovirus in Scandanavia, linked to Serbian raspberries. Mine were German in origin but I hadn't seen this warning in time either way. It could be potentially horrifying if any professional brewery released a commercial beer with fruit that caused that level of illness.
2.1kg gave a ratio of about 1kg of rasperberries to 8 litres of beer.
The beautiful colour was imparted within a couple of days but unlike previous lambic projects with raspberries they never completely lost their colour, I supposed probably because they weren't left long enough.
While the addition of frozen fruit crashed the temperature and stopped airlock activity for a day or so, it started up again shortly after and ceased again about 2.5 weeks later, leaving a steady FG of 1.012. Probably a little higher than I was expecting as 644 has been super attenuative for me before, but I decided not to risk bottle bombs and keg instead. While safer the beer needed to be run through a sieve on it's way to the keg where it was chilled overnight and force carbed "the sodastream way" to around 2.5 vols. Raspberry bits block dip tubes, so this had to be put into the keg via a filter. The photo below shows the first glass out the kegs which was naturally quite cloudy.
 |
| One day in the keg. Opaque but yummy. |
Quare Good IPA took several weeks in the keg to clear completely, but clear it did, and this brew did the same.
Tasting Notes
[20/11/15] Very bitter and very strong raspberry flavour, and quite refreshing. No hints of DMS. Steve Lamond, judging at Sourfest 2015, commented that it was about as bitter and about as full on raspberry as the Irish market would be able to take! I take that as a compliment. Before Sourfest I brought it to the Midlands Beer Festival as organised by my buddy in beer Simon Broderick. Simon himself isn't a massive fan of sour beers, but he reviewed it here (co-incidentally along with another excellent sour beer that we'd see again). I gave a sample to all the pro-brewers at it (most of whom I know from Beer Ireland) and it was received with an overwhelming "whoa!", which I took as a good thing.