My Brewing Log

This was my first attempt on a Gose, a German sour beer that is brewed with coriander and salt. Because I generally don't like sour beers, I only made a 1 gal batch which turned out to be a good idea.

The wort was taken from a batch of wheat beer that was brewed with 70% light wheat malt and 30% Pilsner malt (at 12 Plato) and hopped to about 10 IBU. 0.8 l of the unhopped wort was boiled for 15 min and inoculated with about 1 Tsp crushed malt. This wort was then left to sour at ~ 21 c (70 f) for a few days before 0.5 l were added to 2.5 l of hopped wort and then boiled for 15 min. The boil served to kill all the bugs in the soured wort. 12 crushed coriander seeds and 1/2 tsp of kosher salt were added to the boil as well as 0.5l water to compensate evaporation.

 After cooling the wort was fermented with WY1007 (German Ale) for a week at about 20C (68F) and bottled straight from the fermenter. 2g of table sugar was added to each bottle for carbonation.

 After 2 weeks I tasted the result:

 Appearance:

• good head retention
• cloudy as I remember a Gose from Germany

Aroma:

• there is some light sour aroma, but I think that there should be more

Taste:

• To much salt. The salt is way to prominent and it tastes like Gatorade
  
• Not sour enough. The sourness is rather restrained. I either want to increase the portion of soured wort or just invest into a lacto culture instead of souring with malt
• The coriander is there but barely noticeable. I won't change that for now
• The carbonation was a little low. Most likely it didn't ferment as far as I wanted it to ferment

All in all, a decent, yet not really drinkable first attempt. I'll stick with the small batches off Weissbier batches until I figured out how to get it just right.

This is now the first Weissbier that is part of the "Summer of Wheats":

• 70% Light Wheat malt
  
• 30% Pilsner malt
• 2% acid malt
• 2% CaraAroma

 It was mashed with a Hochkurz mash:

• Infusion to Maltose: 30 mit at 63C
• Infusion to Dextrinizaton: 60 min at 70C
• Decoction to mash-out: 10 min at 76C

Boiled for 60 min with 0.4g/l of alpha acid (Hallertauer) and  fermented a 20C with WY3056.

While I was very excited by a similar beer that I made last year with the same yeast, I'm less impressed with this one. Even though it was fermented fairly high (20 C), the aroma lacks the typical banana esters. One of the reasons might be that the WY 3056 is a blend of yeasts and I cultured the yeast pitch from a slant of that yeast. Most likely the more neutral yeast of the blend prevailed. 

There is also little in the way of spice/clove aroma and taste. But this is dependent on the yeast as well and I didn't do a ferulic acid rest either. Instead I'm getting a mild yeasty note from the aroma and finish. Though there is certainly a "yeasty" category of Weissbiers, I'm not to fond of them.

The 2% CaraAroma made this beer darker than I wanted it to be.

Stats:

• Original Extract: 11.5 Plato
• Fast Ferment Test: 2.7 Plato
• Limit of Attenuation: 76.5 %
• Final Extract of beer: 3.0 Plato
• Attenuation of beer: 74 %

 The limit of attenuation and attenuation of the beer is not quite where I want to have it either. I'd like the fast ferment test extract to be closer to 2.5 Plato and the actual beer extract to be very close to that (2.5 - 2.6 Plato). Weissbiers are generally very well attenuated beers, which is partly a result of the poorly flocculating yeast. This one is a little on the sweet side due to the larger difference between its attenuation and the limit of attenuation.

This beer was an experiment in which I tried a lot of new techniques that I generally don't use in my brewing process. The motivation was that I was not quite happy with the aroma and finish of my beers. For the lagers, in which I use only bittering hops or only little amounts of flavoring hops, I didn't get much aroma from the beer. I feel that it is rather empty compared to a commercial Helles or Maerzen. And the finish still felt a little to harsh. And there is a pesky slight dustiness that I'm occasionally getting from my beers.

So I gave a Helles a try and made sure that I pay attention to all the details that I know could make a difference and which I could take care of w/o bying new equipment:

• use a heated step infusion mash with a 57 C (137 F) dough in and a 2 step saccrification rest. 63 C Maltose rest and then an extended (60 min) rest at 70 C, which is said to be beneficial for body and head retention. This is pretty much as authentic German as it gets and this would be a first for me since it doesn't really fit my brew-house. But I can make it work.
• when batch sparging don't drain the wort below grain level. This is basically in response to the BYO article about sparging
• fix the manifold seal for my MLT. Recently I started pulling in air through this.
• add hops before the hot break and maybe even FWH the batch. Hopefully this smoothens out the finish
• 90 min boil
• DMS rest. When I have an imported Helles it generally has a tad of a sweet aroma. It doesn't smell like the typical DMS aroma to me, but I could imagine that it is DMS which is barely at the aroma threshold. So far I have been chilling my beers below 100 within 10 - 20 min. No Commercial brewery that has a whirlpool can do that and I want to know if this is the reason why my beers have such a clean (=empty) aroma. I'll have to read up on average time that commercial wort is spending hot.
• 12+ hr post chill whirlpool settling. For that I will chill the wort to ~48F and keep it in an ice bath for the next 12 hrs before racking to the fermenter. This is supposed to get rid of about 60% of the cold break. Commercial brewies may have settling tanks for this. And since I don't have a conical I have to go this route.
  

These were a lot of changes, but If the beer really comes out different (and hopefully better) I could start eliminating one extra step after another to figure out what is actually important.

Here is the result:

The first surprise was, that there is great hop flavor and aroma even though all the hops were added before the start of the boil. First wort hopping does work! But the hop utilization was better than expected, so it became more of a Pilsner than a Helles.

I can't detect any DMS in the beer. The DMS rest didn't work, but I found that aged beer may develop a sweet aroma. It's likely that I'm getting this when having a German beer here in the US. Besides this, I had a Spaten Maibock on tap a few days back and its aroma was very similar to my lagers. I seem to be on the right track.

The step mash didn't make a dramatic difference since I cannot taste a difference that I would contribute to that. It may take a side-by side to verify this. But the head retention is good. Difficult to tell if his is a result of the long rest at 70 C.

I used the Bavarian lager (WY2206) for this, since this was the only yeast I had on hand at the time and had to push it hard (i.e. warm maturation rest) to get close to the limit of attenuation. But it didn't want to and stalled 0.5 Plato shy of it:

original extract: 12.0 Plato

limit of attenuation: 82% (fast ferment test AE=2.2 Plato)

beer attenuation: 77% (beer AE=2.7 Plato)

The target for the aparent extract of the beer was 2.5 Plato, and as a result of actually being higher than that the beer is a little sweeter than I'd like it to be. But I know to fix this with a different yeast next time.

I didn't see any benefit of the more complete trub removal. According to some studies and other home brewer's experiments, its importance seems overstated anyway.

The pesky "dusty" taste still exists. But since it only happens when I drink the beer that stood in the beer line for a day, I suspect it is staling in the beer line.