A Spin on a Wit

I made a Pomegranate Wit a little less than a year ago, before I was able to do AG batches, so it was an extract batch. It ended up not turning out due to the introduction of fresh Pomegranates causing an infection. I could tell the beer had potential taste-wise, but most of it was flat, and some were complete gushers with nothing resembling a frothy wit.

So I am going to try this again, except all grain, and a something different. I ran into this interesting recipe on the forum:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f71/killer-bee-belgian-wit-73278/

There is also one for turbid mashing a couple posts down from, that I am more interested in.

I came across this after converting my Wit extract recipe to AG in BeerSmith and BeerSmith decided that it need 50/50 Wheat Malt and Acidualted Malt. Since I had never used Acidulated malt, I had to look it up and what not.

Obviously 50% Acidulated Malt would be WAY too much, but it could be a nice touch to a wit.

So, to get to the point, I have some options to play around with:

-Use POM Juice instead of fresh pomegranate, since it is flash pasteurized.
-Use Acidulated Malt to get a sour "tang"
-Use turbid mashing technique for "sweeter" beer with lots of body
-Use traditional bitter orange peel, but also some sweet orange zest along with turbid mashing to balance the sourness from the acidulated malt and the tartness from the POM juice (essentially making it a Pomegranate Orange Wit.)
-Do not use bitter orange peel, or do not use sweet orange zest.

Any experience with Acidulated malt and Turbid mashing. Would it overpower the POM? Can it be balanced for sourness, tartness, and sweetness?

Since sour and tart are two very different tastes, I think it can be done, but need some insight into what a good way to do it would be.

I would hate to overpower this beer and turn a good Wit into something unrecognizable.

I'm just going to bring this back to the top and try one more time.

I can only contribute two thoughts. First, IMO, the beauty of Belgian ales lies in the elegance of their relative simplicity. Second, along those lines, is that I believe most of the flavor in a Belgian style is supposed to come from the yeast more than specialty grains.

Not saying you CAN'T do whatever you like (& to be honest, I'm only making my first Belgian now after doing some research), just that my own experience with making grain & hop dominated styles left me needing to rearrange my thinking when it came time to expand into Belgian territory.

My two cents.

Sounds interesting - this might be a good candidate for small test batches? You know, make a 2.5 gallon batch with the pomegranite, then make a 2.5 gallon with the aciduated malt and pomegranite? Or do the whole thing as a 5 gal batch, split it across two fermenters and add the pomegranite to one? FWIW, that's how I experiment with recipes - make small batches and change one variable each time. Helps me dial in what each ingredient does. Cheers!

I agree with both of you guys.

Belgians are simple and the yeast is what makes it what it is. I want this to taste like a wit, but have something that makes you go huh? I don't actually enjoy a lot of wits made by American breweries. They just come off boring or tasteless to me. I have had a couple that were great, and some Belgian ones that were awesome.

I have done test batches in the past (still bottle conditioning actually), but found it almost more of a pain to do the small batches than a full 5 gallon just because of the lack of volume to move around causing it to be more sensitive to efficiencies caused from mashing and volume issues with smaller amounts of wort/beer.

I am thinking about a cranberry wit FWIW.

Could you use fresh pomegranate but soak them in vodka first to sterilize?

heckels said:

Could you use fresh pomegranate but soak them in vodka first to sterilize?

Click to expand...

Pomegranates are full of little juice-filled pearls. I don't think you can get anything out of them unless the walls of the little pearls are broken.

heckels said:

Could you use fresh pomegranate but soak them in vodka first to sterilize?

Click to expand...

That is what I did with the last one, but it didn't seem to work, even after running the pomegranate arils (the fruit with seed) through a blender with vodka to break them up.

Also, at 14 cups of fresh pomegranate, it may have needed more vodka, which I was not wanting to add in that amount to the fermentor.

AKnewbrews said:

That is what I did with the last one, but it didn't seem to work, even after running the pomegranate arils (the fruit with seed) through a blender with vodka to break them up.

Also, at 14 cups of fresh pomegranate, it may have needed more vodka, which I was not wanting to add in that amount to the fermentor.

Click to expand...

Duly noted.

If you really had an infection from the pomegranate would not all the bottles end up gushers? The "part flat and part gushers" to me says that the priming sugar was not mixed properly.

I agree with the Guy in the above post... I just bottled a Pom Wit 2 weeks ago... it turned out way better than I could expect. I used 8 poms, 4 during primary and then the juice from 4 that I mixed with 2.5 oz of table sugar for my primeing solution. The head gets a little bigger every bottle I open.

Edit... ok so I agree with the Guy below as well, but now I have given more than a 5 sec though about it, it must be your bottling stage, I can't see any reason for random bottles be gushers ...

Could also be improperly sanitized bottles causing some to develop an infection while packaged.

Very well could have been something with the bottles. Only about 6 bottles were gushers, some had a little carbonation, and the other 80% little to no carbonation.

I was never happy with the taste anyways. It had an off flavor that just never seemed right. It tasted great before secondary with the pomegranate.

I actually have 6 bottles left, I should crack one open and see what has happened to it within the last 6 months.