Berliner Weiss - Full Sail Brewing

The sig other recently discovered she enjoys tart and sour style brews. After trying a few examples at the local bottle shop including DFH's Peche, NB Lychee, and Full Sail's Berliner Weiss http://www.fullsailbrewing.com/brewers-share.cfm, she asked if I could replicate the last.

And so began the search...

I scoured the interwebs for recipes and brewing advice but some of the most helpful came from Chris Haveman, Lead Brewer at Full Sail Brewing Company. Turns out they are quite homebrewing friendly and even have an "ask the brewer" section of their website. Here are sections of the emails from Chris describing the design process of their BW (with his approval):

"Thanks for your question i'm glad you and your wife enjoyed the beer. When I designed this beer we looked at doing it a few ways.

1 - secondary fermentation with LAB. we ruled this out because you are inviting the bacteria to take hold in your brewery. Also it is difficult to remove the bacteria and control the amount of lactic acid in the final product.

2 - mash in and let it rest in the mash tun for a few hours. once again this is difficult to control lactic acid production and the bacteria can make other flavor (bad) components.

3 - use acidulated malt which gives you the control but you need to run a pilot brew to dial it in.

4 - use purified lactic acid which gives us control and gives a clean flavor.


With this beer we just brewed one batch so we went with using purified lactic acid post fermentation. This gave us the ability to hit our target for lactic acid. With our target now established we will move toward using acidulated malt in the future. So as for the boil it was a 60min. If you are trying to replicate something at home I would recommend using the acidulated malt made by weyermann. That way if you like your recipe it will be easy to duplicate."

A followup email from Chris pointed me to Weyermann's website http://www.weyermann.de/cz/faq.asp?umenue=yes&idmenue=62&sprache=2 where a grain bill and description for creating a BW from their aciduated malt is towards the bottom of the page.


I had never given consideration to using pure lactic acid, which would reduce the risk of bacteria contamiantion in other pieces of equipment. Hopefully this info can help others along the way.


If you havent tried the FS BW, it's defiantely worth the $4.50 bomber cost. Great beer on gameday for wine drinkers if you would prefer a beer only party imo.

The recipe I ended up concocting since I already had purchased Wyeast Lacto was:

1.8kg (4 lbs) German Pills
1.8kg (4 lbs) Red Wheat (Red for color)
28g (1 oz) Hallaertau FWH

Mash
25 mins @ 49C (120F)
45 mins @ 65C (150F)
15 mins @ 74C (165F)

15 mins @ 100C (212F)

Chilled to 21C (70F) and pitched x1 Safale-05 and x2 Wyeast Lacto simultaneously.

Happy Brewing, and Happy National Cheeseburger Day!

How did yours turn out?

Still fermenting. Life got real busy and haven't bottled yet. I'll update in a week with prelim tasting info.

I figured longer with the lacto was ok anyways.

http://***********/stories/recipein...r-ale/209-berliner-weisse-napoleons-champagne

This recipe works great!

In my opinion FS Berliner is a good beer. However, I'm not sure how they can get away with calling it a berliner wise or a sour. Other than an extremely mild percieved tartness there is no sourness at all. It's another attempt by an american brewery to produce a style that they simply are not willing to do correctly .. via lacto, so they half arse it. Acidulated Malt would be a step up, a minor one at best, but still a step up. Even with Acidulated Malt it would give more complexity to the tartness, but no real sourness. I'm by no means an expert on sours, but the overwhelming majority of the beers I brew are either sour or wild/Brett.

Forgot to mention .. Edgeoftheus .. 2 packets of lacto is overkill. If you're trying to make it more sour, then add the lacto first and give it a couple days before you add the sacc.

So this beer turned out incredibly sour. Taste was decent, but cheek puckering tart. I would prob used aciduated in the future though.


With regards to full sail, I commend them for thinking outside the box. They tried something different without risking equipment infection. To see the side effects of that, look no further then epic in Seattle. Everything they produce is lacto laced whether it was intended to or not. Great for the sour drinker in my life, but enough to wreck a normal brewery who doesn't kill everything during cleanup.
I may try the linked recipe next time around.

But do think full sail should have called it a neo ber similar to how DFH does with teir perched.