Batch 58

First beer with blackcurrant and of course it’s in a berliner weisse recipe.

When I decided to do this beer I wanted to keep the “regular” berliner weisse recipe and just add gooseberry and blackcurrant, just like I did in Batch 52 with raspberry.

Both the gooseberry and blackcurrant was picked by hand and that of course adds a little extra feeling to it just knowing it came directly from the area instead of somewhere far away. I don’t know if it was necessary but I heated the berries to 85c to get rid of any evil stuff and just kept stirring but not really making puree.

Before adding the berries, I did the regular kettle sour I’ve been doing in previous batches. I think it went well, the process took about 36h and I started with a pH value of 4.0. After waiting 19h the value was pH 3.4 so good progress but not enough sourness for my taste so I decided to let it sit for another 17h to reach pH 3.1 and then start the regular 15 minute boil to kill all the bacteria and what not.

Fermentation kicked off within 12h but after 2 weeks it stopped at a SG of 1.007 which is a lot higher than I anticipated. The yeast Belle Saison is supposed to ferment really well and eat all sugar and leave nothing behind but not this time. I’ve used it before when doing my very first Saison and that time I didn’t have this problem so might’ve done something wrong this time. This also means that the beer didn’t turn out as strong as I designed, but I think this was for the better as now it’s more true to the actual berliner weisse style.

In conclusion, the beer turned out great but I would tone down the amount of goosberry much like I did in Batch 52 as then I did about half the amount of gooseberry compared to raspberry. This time I used same amount of gooseberry as blackcurrant. Always nice with room for improvement!