Tips For Success With White Lab WLP630 Berliner Weisse Blend

Pretty self explanatory, I've never used this yeast or made a sour beer before and I'd like to know how to get the most out of this blend, based off of all of your experience

-What temperature should I do primary at? I've heard temperatures ranging from early 70s to mid 80s.

-How long does this take to reach a nice sour level?

-Conditioning- Do you leave it in secondary for months or bottle it for aging?

Any other general tips and advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance

White labs says optimum temp is 68-72 so I would stick with that for my first time. I have no experience with lacto fermentations yet, but I've heard they take a while to sour. One thing I've heard, and you wouldn't be able to do this with your yeast, is pitch a lacto vile instead of your beer yeast and let it work, and then once the pH has dropped a bit, pitch your beer yeast at high krausen to finish it off.

I think your best bet it to email white labs and ask what they think, I mean they came up with that blended culture.

i primary mine for about 10 -14 days then secondary it for around 6 months give or take depending on your taste. i ferment mine around 72 degrees. I have never used the white labs blend before but im sure its standard issue clean german ale yeast with a lacto culture. It wont even be close to sour for a long time so dont get impatient.

From my own experience and talking it over down at the brewshop, here are a few tips:

Keep wort temp very high (80 degrees!) during the lag time. Lacto likes high temps and will produce more acid in this range. Lag time will be high (up to 72 hours) because I'm assuming the White Labs blend is like Wyeast and has a very low ratio of Sac to Lacto critters in it. This gives the Lacto a chance to do its thing before the yeast takes over fermentation. While its true that sourness in a BW increases somewhat with age, most of the lactic acid is produced before Sac fermentation begins. Just look at all the "my Berliner Weisse isn't sour enough" threads on here. Resist the urge to make a starter. This will alter the Lacto to Sac ratio in the blend. . .and that's the whole point of using a pre-made blend rather than buying both Lacto and yeast. Some will swear the only way it to innoculate with lots of Lacto, then a couple of days later pitch some yeast, but I had good results with the Wyeast blend and holding the wort temp at 80 degrees for the first 3 days.

Drop some unmashed grain on top of your wort and let it run for 3 days, then pitch some US-05 or similar clean yeast. This makes it so you aren;t rolling the dice on underpitched yeast being outperformed by lacto like in the blends.

jbdujka said:

i primary mine for about 10 -14 days then secondary it for around 6 months give or take depending on your taste. i ferment mine around 72 degrees. I have never used the white labs blend before but im sure its standard issue clean german ale yeast with a lacto culture. It wont even be close to sour for a long time so dont get impatient.

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After that long of a fermentation, do you need to add additional yeast before bottling so ensure carbonation as you would with non bugged beers?

tboog86 said:

After that long of a fermentation, do you need to add additional yeast before bottling so ensure carbonation as you would with non bugged beers?

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The low PH is not a good environment for yeast. If any still survive after 6 months, they will be in poor shape. Yes you need to re-yeast with this type of beer after 6 months.

Hi, can you tell me how long I need to leave it to sour? I am using WLP630. Cheers