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!