Occasionally I'll write up a sort of brew log in recipe advice threads for posterity, and I often get crickets but occasionally get some nice feedback on them. Either way, I like to go back and reread them myself because I often relearn things that I've forgotten, rediscover a beer that's still got a few bottles gathering dust, or just get reminded of a good beer experience (a nice thing when I'm in a string of mediocre brews). It's a lot nicer than rereading my paper brew notes which don't get as much detail and don't have the benefit of a backspace bar for editing.
So, the Passion Fruit Gose:
Like most of my non-standard brews, this beer is a bit of a comedy of errors, or at least unexpected hurdles handled in whatever way I could think of at the time.
I started with a pretty normal grainbill and mash:
1.8 kg Domestic Chinese Wheat Malt
1.6 kg Castle Pilsner Malt (Belgian)
Ground relatively fine with the Corona mill, BIAB single infusion in 26.5L at 66C for about an hour, bucket sparged with 4.5L. This is the first beer I've used exclusively RO water from our home system for - my previous brewday, an IPA, used some RO and some jugs of spring water I bought to store RO water for future brewdays.
I think I heated up the kettle while I sparged in my bucket sparge system in order to pasteurize, but I don't have it in my brew notes so I'm not sure if that happened. Either way, I certainly didn't bring it to a boil. I ended up with an unrecorded volume of wort - probably about 29-30L at 5.7 plato. I chilled to the upper 30's celsius, added 10 mL of =/>80% lactic acid to bring down the pH a bit for the kettle sour, tossed in 400g of unmilled Pils malt, took pH readings with my super-cheap, poorly-calibrated pH meter (5.11) and super-cheap pH strips (~5), then tossed in an adequately-sized aquarium heater set to its max of 34C, covered the surface of the wort with sanitized cling wrap, and forgot about it for 36 hours.
36 hours was the longest I could go for logistical reasons so I got ready to boil at that point. There was light-colored scum, not to say a pellicle exactly, on the surface of the wort and it smelled somewhat rancid. I discovered picking up the kettle (should have used a thermometer but I didn't) that the wort was probably closer to the low 20's celsius rather than the 34C I was expecting the aquarium heater to maintain. My only guesses are that the heater's bad (it shouldn't be since it's only been used twice and it's more than big enough for <30L) or that there was no convection in the wort so the heater stopped heating when the localized area around it got to 34C. I wasn't exactly thrilled about how the kettle sour went and I considered chucking the wort and writing it off as a loss, but I decided to go through with it anyway.
The crappy pH equipment reared its ugly head when the post-sour wort read 4.6 on the meter and ~4.1 on the strips. I gave the wort a roughly 80 minute boil to reduce the volume (and maybe a little bit to make sure anything bad that might have been in the wort after such a low-temp kettle sour was deader than dead) and gave it a bagged addition of spices and hops around ten minutes before flameout:
10g crushed coriander
10g sweet osmanthus flowers (桂花 in Chinese)
20g Citra (seems like one of the best hops to pair with passion fruit)
20g pink Himalayan salt
I pulled the bag at flameout to prevent extra bittering while I chilled the wort. I took it down to about 19C and pitched a rehydrated old packet of Brewferm Blanche wit yeast that somebody gave me a couple years ago, along with some US-05 krausen from a Citra IPA I was dry hopping that day - Blanche for character, US-05 for attenuation. I ended up putting about 24 liters into the ale pail (it was almost up to the lid, shame on me!), gave it a blowoff tube, and set the chamber to 17.7C with the probe under the bucket to allow the beer a bit of leeway to ferment a bit warmer and get some character from the wit yeast (don't ask my why I didn't just insulate the probe to the side of the bucket like I do with cooler fermentations and run the temperature a bit higher: this is just how I like to roll when I ferment a bit warm).
That afternoon, I bought five kilograms of passion fruit and spent an hour or two chopping them in half and scraping the pulp and seeds into a sanitized stainless bowl with some old X-Files on the TV. I got 2 kilograms of pulp out of 5 kilograms of fruit (wish I knew something to do with the rinds, what a waste!), blended it in a sanitized blender, then froze it.
A couple weeks later, I decided it was time to add the fruit. I brought the bucket out of the chamber and added the frozen passion fruit in a mesh bag while taking a gravity sample. My tasting notes on the gravity sample (which was at 1.2 plato) say, "Beer is very hazy right now. Light sourness - will probably need more lactic acid. Some notes of Citra hops and 桂花 (osmanthus flowers), salt is a bit light but present. Will probably need 10mL lactic and 10g salt." I left the bucket outside of the fermentation chamber, which is on top of a mini-fridge where I chill bottles and store hops and yeast, for fear of spilling from the bucket that was literally full to the lid. Ambient temperature was ~19C and secondary fermentation on fruit (Brewer's Friend - my beersmith computer wasn't at home - said it would add about 0.9p of gravity) shouldn't be a huge issue for yeast off-flavors at that temperature.
The next day I realized I was an idiot to add that much fruit to an already full bucket so I racked to a secondary bucket, which bought me some small amount of headspace so the bucket wasn't leaking at the seals anymore. I tossed one of those lid opener tools under one side of the bucket to encourage the yeast to flocculate to one side of the bucket for easier racking to the bottling bucket - something I'd read about doing several times but never remembered to actually try myself. I harvested about 150 mL of the yeast slurry because I have a feeling I'll be making more Goses in the future (this is just my second one but I'm falling in love with the style) and I was pretty proud of the idea to blend the two yeasts.
I let the secondary go for six or seven days while the ambient temperature rose to about 21C and then put the bucket in the fridge to cold crash for a couple days, still tilted with the lid opening tool.
Finally, after three or four days of cold crashing, it was bottling day. I took a sample before racking to the bottling bucket in order to get a taste and see if I would need to add salt or lactic acid with my priming sugar. In addition to being downright delicious, there was a hint of background saltiness and the passion fruit had brought the beer closer to my desired sourness level, so instead of 10g and 10mL like I had originally estimated, I gave it 5g of salt and 6mL of lactic acid with 130g of boiled sucrose for priming. The FG was 1.3p so the fruit had left a little bit of sugar in the beer (though it's definitely within a margin of error), along with a ton of flavor. With an OG just under 9p adjusted for the fruit and an FG of 1.3p, that should make this brew right around 4%, which is right in the sweet spot for a Gose.
As I racked to the bottling bucket, I squeezed as much leftover liquid out of the passion fruit bag as I could with a sanitized serving spoon. I tasted a little bit of it afterward and it tasted like passion fruit without any sugar, which I think is exactly what it should taste like.
I ended up bottling just a bit over 22.5L of beer (a new record!) in mixed bottles, including some 750mL Martinelli's sparkling cider bottles (they take regular crown caps!). The next day, there was visible krausen in the bottle necks, which I've had before but not often.
You've borne with me this long (presumably, or you probably wouldn't be reading this), so it's time for the payoff: how is it?
I don't actually know! I've strung you along through this unreasonably long brew log for a beer I haven't even tried yet! Anecdotally, a day and a half after bottling I brought two bottles to a local brewpub to share with the brewer. He's not one for patience so, knowing it probably wasn't carbed much if at all yet, he tossed one in the freezer and opened it that night. He sent me a message a couple hours later asking when I'd be able to come brew a batch with him for the bar. I'm taking that as a good sign. For anyone who actually wants to see my own tasting notes, I've got a bottle, 5.5 days conditioned, in the fridge that I plan on popping open tonight. I'll give an update then.
So, the Passion Fruit Gose:
Like most of my non-standard brews, this beer is a bit of a comedy of errors, or at least unexpected hurdles handled in whatever way I could think of at the time.
I started with a pretty normal grainbill and mash:
1.8 kg Domestic Chinese Wheat Malt
1.6 kg Castle Pilsner Malt (Belgian)
Ground relatively fine with the Corona mill, BIAB single infusion in 26.5L at 66C for about an hour, bucket sparged with 4.5L. This is the first beer I've used exclusively RO water from our home system for - my previous brewday, an IPA, used some RO and some jugs of spring water I bought to store RO water for future brewdays.
I think I heated up the kettle while I sparged in my bucket sparge system in order to pasteurize, but I don't have it in my brew notes so I'm not sure if that happened. Either way, I certainly didn't bring it to a boil. I ended up with an unrecorded volume of wort - probably about 29-30L at 5.7 plato. I chilled to the upper 30's celsius, added 10 mL of =/>80% lactic acid to bring down the pH a bit for the kettle sour, tossed in 400g of unmilled Pils malt, took pH readings with my super-cheap, poorly-calibrated pH meter (5.11) and super-cheap pH strips (~5), then tossed in an adequately-sized aquarium heater set to its max of 34C, covered the surface of the wort with sanitized cling wrap, and forgot about it for 36 hours.
36 hours was the longest I could go for logistical reasons so I got ready to boil at that point. There was light-colored scum, not to say a pellicle exactly, on the surface of the wort and it smelled somewhat rancid. I discovered picking up the kettle (should have used a thermometer but I didn't) that the wort was probably closer to the low 20's celsius rather than the 34C I was expecting the aquarium heater to maintain. My only guesses are that the heater's bad (it shouldn't be since it's only been used twice and it's more than big enough for <30L) or that there was no convection in the wort so the heater stopped heating when the localized area around it got to 34C. I wasn't exactly thrilled about how the kettle sour went and I considered chucking the wort and writing it off as a loss, but I decided to go through with it anyway.
The crappy pH equipment reared its ugly head when the post-sour wort read 4.6 on the meter and ~4.1 on the strips. I gave the wort a roughly 80 minute boil to reduce the volume (and maybe a little bit to make sure anything bad that might have been in the wort after such a low-temp kettle sour was deader than dead) and gave it a bagged addition of spices and hops around ten minutes before flameout:
10g crushed coriander
10g sweet osmanthus flowers (桂花 in Chinese)
20g Citra (seems like one of the best hops to pair with passion fruit)
20g pink Himalayan salt
I pulled the bag at flameout to prevent extra bittering while I chilled the wort. I took it down to about 19C and pitched a rehydrated old packet of Brewferm Blanche wit yeast that somebody gave me a couple years ago, along with some US-05 krausen from a Citra IPA I was dry hopping that day - Blanche for character, US-05 for attenuation. I ended up putting about 24 liters into the ale pail (it was almost up to the lid, shame on me!), gave it a blowoff tube, and set the chamber to 17.7C with the probe under the bucket to allow the beer a bit of leeway to ferment a bit warmer and get some character from the wit yeast (don't ask my why I didn't just insulate the probe to the side of the bucket like I do with cooler fermentations and run the temperature a bit higher: this is just how I like to roll when I ferment a bit warm).
That afternoon, I bought five kilograms of passion fruit and spent an hour or two chopping them in half and scraping the pulp and seeds into a sanitized stainless bowl with some old X-Files on the TV. I got 2 kilograms of pulp out of 5 kilograms of fruit (wish I knew something to do with the rinds, what a waste!), blended it in a sanitized blender, then froze it.
A couple weeks later, I decided it was time to add the fruit. I brought the bucket out of the chamber and added the frozen passion fruit in a mesh bag while taking a gravity sample. My tasting notes on the gravity sample (which was at 1.2 plato) say, "Beer is very hazy right now. Light sourness - will probably need more lactic acid. Some notes of Citra hops and 桂花 (osmanthus flowers), salt is a bit light but present. Will probably need 10mL lactic and 10g salt." I left the bucket outside of the fermentation chamber, which is on top of a mini-fridge where I chill bottles and store hops and yeast, for fear of spilling from the bucket that was literally full to the lid. Ambient temperature was ~19C and secondary fermentation on fruit (Brewer's Friend - my beersmith computer wasn't at home - said it would add about 0.9p of gravity) shouldn't be a huge issue for yeast off-flavors at that temperature.
The next day I realized I was an idiot to add that much fruit to an already full bucket so I racked to a secondary bucket, which bought me some small amount of headspace so the bucket wasn't leaking at the seals anymore. I tossed one of those lid opener tools under one side of the bucket to encourage the yeast to flocculate to one side of the bucket for easier racking to the bottling bucket - something I'd read about doing several times but never remembered to actually try myself. I harvested about 150 mL of the yeast slurry because I have a feeling I'll be making more Goses in the future (this is just my second one but I'm falling in love with the style) and I was pretty proud of the idea to blend the two yeasts.
I let the secondary go for six or seven days while the ambient temperature rose to about 21C and then put the bucket in the fridge to cold crash for a couple days, still tilted with the lid opening tool.
Finally, after three or four days of cold crashing, it was bottling day. I took a sample before racking to the bottling bucket in order to get a taste and see if I would need to add salt or lactic acid with my priming sugar. In addition to being downright delicious, there was a hint of background saltiness and the passion fruit had brought the beer closer to my desired sourness level, so instead of 10g and 10mL like I had originally estimated, I gave it 5g of salt and 6mL of lactic acid with 130g of boiled sucrose for priming. The FG was 1.3p so the fruit had left a little bit of sugar in the beer (though it's definitely within a margin of error), along with a ton of flavor. With an OG just under 9p adjusted for the fruit and an FG of 1.3p, that should make this brew right around 4%, which is right in the sweet spot for a Gose.
As I racked to the bottling bucket, I squeezed as much leftover liquid out of the passion fruit bag as I could with a sanitized serving spoon. I tasted a little bit of it afterward and it tasted like passion fruit without any sugar, which I think is exactly what it should taste like.
I ended up bottling just a bit over 22.5L of beer (a new record!) in mixed bottles, including some 750mL Martinelli's sparkling cider bottles (they take regular crown caps!). The next day, there was visible krausen in the bottle necks, which I've had before but not often.
You've borne with me this long (presumably, or you probably wouldn't be reading this), so it's time for the payoff: how is it?
I don't actually know! I've strung you along through this unreasonably long brew log for a beer I haven't even tried yet! Anecdotally, a day and a half after bottling I brought two bottles to a local brewpub to share with the brewer. He's not one for patience so, knowing it probably wasn't carbed much if at all yet, he tossed one in the freezer and opened it that night. He sent me a message a couple hours later asking when I'd be able to come brew a batch with him for the bar. I'm taking that as a good sign. For anyone who actually wants to see my own tasting notes, I've got a bottle, 5.5 days conditioned, in the fridge that I plan on popping open tonight. I'll give an update then.
