Acid Malt (AG) Berliner Weisse

[mabrungard]

A tart style like Berliner Weisse is ideally suited to a water with very low alkalinity. Since alkalinity would consume some of that nice acidity that you want in a BW, starting out the mash with very little is a good idea.

The mashing of a BW is best at the same pH as any other beer. Getting the room temp pH measurement down into the low 5 range is desirable. You would not want to acidify your starting wort to less than 5. All the yeast and bacteria action during the ferment will take it the rest of the way to the desirable sub-4 pH range.

Bru'n Water has a very handy set of calculators for getting your BW mash water into the proper range. The link to the program is in the signature line below.

Starting out with DI or RO water is a pretty good idea for brewing a BW. It has the low alkalinity this beer needs. I little CaCl to bump the calcium to at least 40 ppm is a good idea too.

 

[burtonbaton]

hey sorry for the lack of follow up, I've moved and been on vacation since bottling and haven't tasted the final product yet (probably tonight). From the taste at bottling, I'd say it's pretty hard to over do it in terms of tartness just using acidulated malt. I also used some lemon, lime, and orange zest at the end of my boil. I'll report more after I taste the carbonated version. It's 85 already in Tucson, so it's definitely time to crack open a BW.

 

[Patirck]

Bump!

Any updates from Mat or burtonbaton???

 

[burtonbaton]

Well, my beer is the closest to a drain pour I've made in 20 batches. That being said I'm not sure it was the acidulated malt or the short boil that makes it so awful, and I am not experienced enough to know what went wrong except I went a little crazy on this one, so who knows. I think my biggest mistake was I used Burton Ale yeast (I was obsessed with it at the time, over it now), and the sulphur taste from the yeast is too strong in this weak of a beer. I've been trying it about once a month hoping for a miracle. There's also some strong phenol tones going on, and I think I had some issues with warm ferm temps. Also, I put citrus peels in after primary fermentation calmed down, not sure if it did anything, but certainly didn't help. I think I'm not going to try this again for a long time. I don't want to discourage anyone else from trying it, as I just tried too many things at once, and it went wrong.

 

[user 22118]

Been a while, but I have to say that this is one of the most "lemonade like" refreshing beers. That said, it is best in small amounts because you don't want to have ten gallons that nobody will drink. Really the things to keep in mind are that you want dry, no extra flavors from some fancy yeast and low alcohol (for the traditional since you use lacto, this with acid malt can be bumped a bit). This isn't for everyone. I had a really good friend that couldn't drink it and the man drank a lot of beer.

Good luck if you try it.