When to transfer a berliner

Does anyone have good insight/recommendation on when a berliner weisse should be transfered from the primary to a seconday?

FYI - I brewed a Jamil'ish recipe berliner with approx 1.032 og, i did the short boil (15 minutes), pitched a vial of white labs 6 months past guarantee date lacto d @120 F for 3 days (all i could get local) letting it come down to room temp before adding wlp011 euro yeast. I have a slight (very slight) white pellicle'ish film on top with one or two 1" diameter bubbles. I have not disturbed the carboy since brew date 2 months ago, so it should be full of co2 yet. the film layer has not increased or changed much in the past month. should i transfer this off the yeast cake? should I let it go?

What did you pitch from white labs for souring ? I want to brew this style soon.

Lacto at 120 is too hot for it...good way to kill a bunch off. I go from fermentation to bottle in a week as indications are this gets a faster lacto character than bulk aging. Let the bottles condition in the 80's and the lacto character will be gtg in a couple weeks. There is no reason for this style to be aged like a lambic IMO, so that said, I would consider re-yeasting with lacto and sacc and bottle.

So do you pitch the lacto and sac at the same time then a week later you bottle?

i bottled my second to last one about 3 weeks after doing pretty much what you did, except i just held lacto for 36 hours before pitching yeast... the second one got 6 weeks and had WL berliner weisse blend... still a bit sulfury but i'm pretty sure it'll go away.

it seems the consensus is there's no reason to wait a long time to bottle a BW... my next one will be sour mash, no boil, mash hopped and bottled the minute gravity stabilizes. just to see the difference.

calebawilson said:

So do you pitch the lacto and sac at the same time then a week later you bottle?

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Yes. I use Wyeast lacto, do a 2L starter at 98 degrees on the stir plate for a couple of days, cold crash (finings can really help to crash the lacto since they are slow about it without help) then split that in half and pitch with the sacc into the two carboys (10 gallon batch) and let it ferment out. Its done in about 3 days...if it wasn't for my work schedule I would bottle in about 4 days. The one issue I'm having is getting the carbonation correct, there is still a lot of carbonation in the beer that early so I'm working on figuring out how much sugar I need to get my volume correct without blowing up a bottle. Unfortunately the last batch is under carbonated quite a bit...I'm thinking of doing a test run and opening 10 bottles and giving them each a little more sugar progressively to figure out how much sugar I actually need for bottling at 7 days.

jtakacs said:

i bottled my second to last one about 3 weeks after doing pretty much what you did, except i just held lacto for 36 hours before pitching yeast... the second one got 6 weeks and had WL berliner weisse blend... still a bit sulfury but i'm pretty sure it'll go away.

it seems the consensus is there's no reason to wait a long time to bottle a BW... my next one will be sour mash, no boil, mash hopped and bottled the minute gravity stabilizes. just to see the difference.

Click to expand...

I'd shy away from the sour mash, way to much stuff going on there that can ruin everything. I've heard there is little to no difference between a short boil and no-boil, but I do no-boils with a decoction...I'm amazed there is no DMS in the end product with this method...maybe it just isn't hot enough long enough to form it, but I really don't know the science behind the formation of DMS, just that I don't get it in the BW method I use.