Berliner weisse the quick way (to make your house smell of vomit)

All of a sudden the weather is getting warmer and summer is just around the corner. I'm now brewing for the summer. Crowd pleasing pale ales for camping trips and  thirst quenching wheat beers for baking hot summer days.

This year I also wanted to have a try making a low abv wheat beer called "berliner wiesse." Its a sour wheat beer which can be tart and refreshing, perfect on a hot day.

The traditional beer is soured with the main fermentation - a lactic acid producing bacteria (lacto-bacillus) is added in with the brewers yeast and the beer slowly sours. A faster way of making the beer is to sour the mash first, then to boil the wort and ferment as normal. This has the added benefit of not adding lacto-bacillus into fermenters and tubing etc. where it can stay around and get into other beers (souring these unintentionally). Another benefit is that it means the beer can be hopped and dry hopped more than the traditional version, hops stop lacto-bacillus from acting.

The method is pretty simple. Make a 1030-1035ish wort - i used 1.7kg of wheat malt in a BIAB mash. The mash went really well, it eventually came out at 1032 after the boil, colour was fantastic.

The next part was new to me. Basically I got two handfuls of pale malt grain and popped these into a hopping bag, and throw them in. The raw grains house lacto-bacillus on them, and quickly a thin krausen formed on top (i did this in the stainless brew kettle so i could boil clean everything easily afterwards.) I left this to do its thing and get even smellier hoping that this would do the job souring.

So far so good. Everything to plan as I had read. But one thing i wasn't prepared for, which was the awful smell. The wort smelled of vomit. Like a street outside a pub early in the morning on Saturday after payday. But it was in my house, and horrified I knew the next step was to boil it. I couldn't quite get the boiler outside, I opened every window I could. The result was that my kitchen stank of vomit for 2 days. This got me in a lot of trouble with my wife, and so its probably the last time i can make this for a while without a different method.

I boiled the wort for 15 mins with 25g of English Archer hops, which have an Apricot fruity tinge. The plan is to dry hop with Amarillo for a nice fruity Aroma.

So far, a week into fermentation the vomit smell has dies back a lot, but its still there in the background - I hope this will go by the time this gets out of the bottle in a few weeks!

Wychwood brewery tour

In February I took a tour around the Wychwood brewery in the Cotswolds. It's where both the Wychwood and Brakespear named beers are brewed. 

The brewery itself is nestled in behind the small Cotswold town of Witney, Oxfordshire. The tour takes around 20 people around the whole brewery, giving an idea of how the beers are made and telling  some of the history of the site. 

Outside the brewery, waiting for the tour to begin

Once inside, and after an introduction over a half pint in the tap-room, the tour quickly moves into the main building, but first you get a sneak peak at the Brakspear fermenters. What also strikes you is a big hit of fresh yeast - wow, that smell is amazing. From this point on you know you are no longer in a pub and you are very much unmistakably in a brewery.

Brakspear fermenting vats - the ones in the foreground are the secondary fermenters

The history is all around, in particular the front door is a nice piece. Our guide had lots of anecdotes about the buildings, their history and the way the business has evolved over time.

Lovely old door on the brewery

Our knowledgeable guide

The main Wychwood fermenting vats are very different to the Brakspear ones, very modern stainless steel tanks - there were about twenty in all and each one utilised with a brew.

The main fermenting vats

The brewing vessels themselves were massive. The copper "kettle" rose all the way from the floor to the ceiling. This brings a huge amount of liquid to the boil. Likewise the other brewing vessels are also much larger, the hop back and the whirlpool.

The copper - a huge vat!

The silver vat I think is the hop back...

Lovely period malt miller, they don't make them like this any more etc

The whirlpool

Having had a good look around the brewery, and getting a hang of how everything works we finally got led back to the taproom for a tasting session.

Here we got to try a wee bit of almost all the main range of Wychwood beers. Not much more than a pint per person but a good way to try a big range of beers. In particular I enjoyed the Arrowayne (3.6%) which is an excellent session-able mild.

Overall a great way to spend an afternoon. It's a well pitched tour, enough detail to satisfy, not so much beer nerdery that it's not accessible.

The tasting! YUM!