Berliner Weisse Recipe?

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Jsta Porter

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Hello,

Anyone have a tried and true berliner weisse recipe?

I have been hankering to try this style and want a good starting point.

Many thanks!
 
How about starting with a good Gose/Hefe recipe then souring it up in secondary? Bonus points for using your own local microbes.
 
How about starting with a good Gose/Hefe recipe then souring it up in secondary? Bonus points for using your own local microbes.

Local microbes rarely work all that well, and he wants a berliner weisse, so the only thing he needs on top of sach is lacto.

A good recipe is usually along the lines of 50/50 wheat to barley. Shoot for an OG around 1.030. It's really not the grain that this style is about though.
You need to decide how sour you want it. The only way to achieve my desired sourness is to pitch the lacto first(make a massive starter, way bigger than a yeast starter), wait a few days and then add your chosen yeast. But you may want it less sour.

The yeast really play big here to. I've had Berliner Weisse that used a hefe yeast which gave it a clove taste, which was a nice thing, but personally I prefer a more neutral yeast and one that will attenuate well and drop clear. (Remember it's the Champagne of the north. Light, highly carbonated and dry.)

Next something you find when you play with a lot of bugs is they will take trace elements in your water that have never effected your beers and do weird things with them. I would highly recommend starting with RO water and adding some ions back to it.
 
A good recipe is usually along the lines of 50/50 wheat to barley. Shoot for an OG around 1.030. It's really not the grain that this style is about though.
You need to decide how sour you want it. The only way to achieve my desired sourness is to pitch the lacto first(make a massive starter, way bigger than a yeast starter), wait a few days and then add your chosen yeast. But you may want it less sour.


How big a starter are we talking here? And how long before the lacto grows sufficiently in the starter?
 
Next something you find when you play with a lot of bugs is they will take trace elements in your water that have never effected your beers and do weird things with them. I would highly recommend starting with RO water and adding some ions back to it.

What ions do you add back in? I'm looking for a water profile that would work nicely with this style.
 
I know this isn't directly related to the main thread, but have any of you noticed more sourness from lacto or pedio?
 
i used Jamil z. recipie with the wyeast blend.

Smelled of wheat and yogurt and funk last week.
Im still 1-2 months from bottling.
 
Flyanglers recipe works great. I hear good things about the wyeast blend that is out right now and I think I am going to start a batch for next summer soon.
 
the thick green muck on the top of mine is starting to thin.
Activity in the air lock stopped about a week or 2 ago.
Figure ill let it sit for 3-4 more weeks and bottle it.
 
I just brewed one according to Jamil Z.'s recipe from the show on Berliner Weisse's, it's a good listen, here's the link: http://www.thebrewingnetwork.com/shows/The-Jamil-Show/Berliner-Weisse-The-Jamil-Show-10-08-07

And here's flyangler's recipe if you haven't perused it yet, it's quite popular (and award winning) as well. https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f72/spurhund-zunge-95539/

JZ's and flyangler's recipes aren't all that different, it just comes down to choice and amount of hops. Same boil time, and same yeast. Have you brewed one up yet? I think the most debated variable is the order of pitching lacto. d. and your yeast. The bigger the head start you give the lacto, the more sour the finished beer.

I pitched a vial of WLP677 (lacto) with no starter, and brought the temperature of the fermenter into the 90's with a heat lamp. 24 hours later, I cooled it in an ice bath, and I pitched the yeast slurry from a 1L starter I made a few days back (using a stir plate). So basically I gave the lacto very optimal conditions for a day. It was fermenting like a rocket before I cooled it down. The airlock activity surprised me since I had read in Wild Brews that lacto d. is homofermentative, but reading back over the section again I saw that lacto d. produces CO2 as well.

My reasoning in creating a starter, which is definitely NOT required for a 1.034 beer is that it might have some trouble with the pH and lack of oxygen. I did aerate before I pitched the lacto, but I imagine all of the oxygen was driven out by the massive CO2 production which I hadn't been counting on. Hmm, hope that helps. There's a bunch more comments about brewing a Berliner Weisse in the recipe thread I linked...
 
I'm a bit puzzled bythe long fermentation times some are mentioning. To me Berliner Weisse should be clear, crisp, dry, sour and refreshing. While some historic Berliners had a combination of bugs, including Brett from barrels, modern ones (Kindl Weisse) are only soured with pediococcus, which works fairly quickly following primary. The beer is wonderful consumed young! this is not lambic with a German accent!

For a bit more complexity, I usually sour with a mixture of live yoghurt (just dump a cupful in your secondary) and/or a couple "pro-biotic" food supplement talets dissolved in a little warm water. In both cases the prominent bugs are Lactobacillus spp. rather than pedio, but they do make a nice clean sour.

Aother approach I have success with with all-grain Berliners is to pull a quart or two of the mash, let it sour mash for a day or two or three, then heat it to about 165-170 and hold it there for 15 minutes to pasteurize. I then sparge this with a bit of warm water and add it to the fermenting brew. It's relatively easy to control the amount of sourness using this technique.
 
Aother approach I have success with with all-grain Berliners is to pull a quart or two of the mash, let it sour mash for a day or two or three, then heat it to about 165-170 and hold it there for 15 minutes to pasteurize. I then sparge this with a bit of warm water and add it to the fermenting brew. It's relatively easy to control the amount of sourness using this technique.

Wouldn't pasteurization be counter-productive in this instance?
Interesting techniques by the way...
 
petree3 said:
Wouldn't pasteurization be counter-productive in this instance?
Interesting techniques by the way...

Nope, the souring is all done in the mash, pasteurizing stops it, and the yeast do the rest.

I managed a bronze medal on my first try and it was all natural to boot. I cultured lacto from two row that I had, did a traditional mash with mash hop (Christian England's recipe), no boil, fermented at 90 deg for two days with the lacto culture, allowed to cool and added yeast for the rest of the fermentation. I lost points due to lacking malt character (used 2-row instead of Pilsener) but it drinks well. The beer is quite sour though so I'm going to do a cooler lacto ferment next time.

I bottled at 2 weeks with 3.5 volumes, got good 6 weeks later. I think that I picked up a wild yeast that through an off flavor that ended up clearing out with some conditioning.
 
i used Jamil z. recipie with the wyeast blend.

Smelled of wheat and yogurt and funk last week.
Im still 1-2 months from bottling.
Do you have the link to Jamil berliner recipe? Looked in the recipe forum but couldn't fine it.
 
The recipe for a Berliner is literally the least important part of making a Berliner. It’s Pilsner and Wheat, 5 IBUs or less or no hops for that matter. Shoot for 3.2-3.8% ABV.

It’s the process that’s key

For kettle souring:

Normal Mash 150ish/Sparge
Some will boil for 5 minutes others no
Acidify with Lactic acid to 4.5 Ph
Pitch 1/2 carton of Mango Good Belly per 5/6 gallons keep between 90 and 100 for 16-20 hours. Fill the head space of your kettle or whatever with as much CO2 as possible and wrap in Saran Wrap. You should see 3.5 PH in that time period with lacto in Good Belly. Key is minimal O2 exposure. You can go lower. Fermentation will often raise the PH slightly. All depends on how tart you want it.

If you want to kill the lacto boil as normal. Or you could do a no boil and just pitch sacch if you have separate gear for bugs and bacteria.

Pitch a larger than normal starter of 001/1056 or 1007 as these tend to deal with the low PH better.

A PH meter is kinda helpful
 
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I was immediately hooked on Hefe Weizen when I was stationed in Germany in the 70s.

When I was stationed there again in the 90s the Wall was down and we were free to travel the entire country we visited Berlin for a long weekend.

Once there we (us and another couple) tried a true Berliner Weisse. We (guys) tried a couple of both, the red and the green, for comparison. I was totally not impressed.
 
The recipe for a Berliner is literally the least important part of making a Berliner. It’s Pilsner and Wheat, 5 IBUs or less or no hops for that matter. Shoot for 3.2-3.8% ABV.

It’s the process that’s key

For kettle souring:

Normal Mash 150ish/Sparge
Some will boil for 5 minutes others no
Acidify with Lactic acid to 4.5 Ph
Pitch 1/2 carton of Mango Good Belly per 5/6 gallons keep between 90 and 100 for 16-20 hours. Fill the head space of your kettle or whatever with as much CO2 as possible and wrap in Saran Wrap. You should see 3.5 PH in that time period with lacto in Good Belly. Key is minimal O2 exposure. You can go lower. Fermentation will often raise the PH slightly. All depends on how tart you want it.

Pitch a larger than normal starter of 001/1056 or 1007 as these tend to deal with the low PH better.

A PH meter is kinda helpful
Why do you add the Mango Good Belly?

When I brewed MTF Gose, I mash, sparge, boil 15mins, pitch lacto, wait for deisred PH, boil 15 mins, pitch yeast and wait about a week to keg.
 
The Mango Good Belly is the lacto. It’s totally idiot proof. 1/2 carton all shaken up will get you a low PH in a very short period of time between 90 and 100... maybe slightly longer if you pitch warm and just let it cool if you can’t maintain a higher temp.
 
The Mango Good Belly is the lacto. It’s totally idiot proof. 1/2 carton all shaken up will get you a low PH in a very short period of time between 90 and 100... maybe slightly longer if you pitch warm and just let it cool if you can’t maintain a higher temp.
Interesting, I might give that a try. This is what you're referring to, correct?

This is what I used in the past...https://www.northernbrewer.com/omeg...t-LSWIrjxaN2TC_FzvQ2RZhQjOht_LjxoCgf0QAvD_BwE
 
There’s nothing wrong with the lacto from yeast labs, works great. The Good Belly is just easy to get and it’s relatively cheap and you get a bunch of lacto. The Mango has the least flavor impact of all the flavors, none from what I can tell.
 
If you want to go even simpler, combine the Goodbelly method with an all DME wort. I do this all the time and it makes a fantastic beer (and an extremely short brew day).

There's a recipe here: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forum/threads/cheat-tart-gose-all-extract-kettle-soured.601297/

It's a gose, but you can just leave out the coriander and salt and you've basically got a Berliner. It's also a bit over the actual ABV of a typical gose/Berliner, so scale it as you see fit.
 
There’s nothing wrong with the lacto from yeast labs, works great. The Good Belly is just easy to get and it’s relatively cheap and you get a bunch of lacto. The Mango has the least flavor impact of all the flavors, none from what I can tell.
I'll give it a try. Thanks!
 
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