Rhubarb Berliner Weisse

The Plan:
Earlier this year, I started getting more into sour ales. Not completely, but a bit here and there. I think it started with Magic Hat's Odd Notion this past winter. Long story short, I was thinking about brewing a sour ale when I met Amy, a friend and relative of one of my wife's co-workers. She's into beers and brewing and actually works at Magic Hat now. She had an idea to pair rhubarb with a sour ale given its tartness. I liked the idea, and when I started researching to see what a good style would be, I thought something sweet might be best. Almost right away, I landed on a Berliner Weisse, and of course when I punched in "Rhubarb Berliner Weisse", I found a few people had already come up with this pairing, go figure. Oh well, we'll give it a shot anyways!

Amy had access to a bunch of rhubarb so she grabbed a few pounds and froze it. I did some research on the best way to brew a berliner, and came up with a few options: decoction, single infusion, sour mash, no boil, short boil, full boil, lactobacillus + US-05, wyeast berliner blend, add lactic acid at end, etc. Lots of ways to do this. I decided I didn't want to mess with a sour mash because I didn't want to contaminate my cooler with any little buggers. I kind of liked the idea of just using the Wyeast blend eventhough a bunch of people said the '08 version didn't give enough tartness. I'm hoping that the 2010 version has corrected that, so I'll put my trust in them. I pretty much based my recipe off of Jamil's recipe in Brewing Classic Styles, and would just add some rhubarb to secondary when the time comes.

THE RECIPE:
5 Gallon batch
OG: 1.032
FG:
ABV:
IBU: 7
SRM:
4# German Pils
4# German Wheat
1 oz. Hallertau
3# Rhubarb, cut into 1/4" chunks and frozen, to be added in secondary
Wyeast 3191 - Berliner Blend (Private Collection)

7/23 BREWDAY:
This was a pretty busy day. Dave came over and so did Amy. We started the day off with bottling the saison into a bunch of 750 mL Belgian beer bottles, corking them, and winding down a wire basket on top. While we were doing that, I started heating the strike water.
Mash:
Single Infusion, mash @ 149/150 for 90 minutes
Strike - 10 qts @ 164
After 60 minutes, temp had slipped to about 146, added 3 qts 180F to raise up to 149.
After 90, collected 2 gallons, first runnings Brix 14/1.057
Sparge w/ ~4 gallons @ 168, pre-boil gravity - 8/1.032
Boiled for 15 minutes, added the Hallertau right at the beginning of the boil.
Chilled, took temp readings every minute... got to 69.9 in 31 minutes.
Did not make a yeast starter this time, figured the Activator pack for this low of gravity would be enough. Pitched about midnight.
Checked @ 10AM the next day, absolutely flat.
Checked @ 6PM, clean white froth forming.
Checked @ 11PM, comletely blew out of blow tube... so it's working :-)

More later...

4/27 RACKED TO A QUICK 2ND:
Wow, it's been a long time since I brewed this.  Just over 9 months now.  I finally had a taste of a real Berliner (1809) and was happy to see a lot of similarities.  The main areas that were different were color - the 1809 was a shade darker; and tartness - again the 1809 was a little more tart.  I went through a lot of scrambling to try and doctor mine up a bit using lactic acid.  I also still had the idea of making rhubarb syrup to include with the bottles for the homebrew competition, but was told at length why logisitically it wouldn't work.  So in the end, I decided to go back to the original idea of the Rhubarb Berliner.  I thawed out the rhubarb I had int he freezer, compressed and collected all the juice.  I sanitized a keg, threw the juice in, then racked the beer on top.  This is only going to stay in here for a day or so, really not a lot of time to infuse, but it's got to be bottled and submitted to the homebrew comp by Friday.  Gulp.  The beer itself, with the rhubarb, is almost perfect now.  The tartness of the rhubarb has helped out with that aspect greatly.  The one thing that I'm worried about now is carbonation.  I'm assuming that 9 months has dropped out all of the viable yeast.  I'll have to do some more research before I bottle, knowing whether to add some additional yeast or not.

A review from Mr. Don Osborn:

Cranberry Oak Bark Tripel

THE PLAN:
Last year I tried something crazy... I brewed a 1 gallon experimental batch of an oak bark ale, based off of a recipe in Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers. I liked how it turned out for the most part... with some minor adjustments, I think I could make a really killer 2nd version of it, all grain and 5 gallons this time. I decided that the base beer I'd use was a Belgian Specialty Ale or maybe a Belgian Tripel... very close styles. I used some cranberries in it last time to balance out the dry oaky taste, and I plan to use them again. With the oak, I thought I'd use some oak cubes in the secondary to add a little more oak flavor to the mix. So here we go...

THE RECIPE:
15# Belgian Pilsner
3/4# Caravienne
1/4# Aromatic Malt
2# Table Sugar
1 oz Fuggles (60)
1/2 oz Willamette (15)
1/2 oz Fuggles (10)
24 oz Craisins
24 oz Fresh Cranberries
Lightly Toasted Oak Chips (not sure how much I'm adding)

7/10 BREWDAY:
Brewday was mayhem. I nailed my strike temp, and it stayed exactly where it was supposed to be for the full 90 minutes. BUT, somehow my gravity was way way lower than what was projected, even at 65% efficiency. I was freaking out a bit. But, I chilled, collected 7 gallons of wort and decided to do a 2 hour boil, plus I still had 2#'s of table sugar to add.  Pre-boil gravity was 1.044, after 2 hr boil and addition of 2#s of sugar, SG was 1.082

7/23 RACKED TO 2ND:
Time to get this puppy on the oak & cranberries. I added 24 oz. of craisins, 24 oz. of fresh crushed cranberries, and about an ounce of light toast french oak chips to the bottom of a freshly sanitized carboy, then racked the tripel on top. Planning on keeping it on here for about a week. Gravity check before adding it on top of the cranberries was 8/1.002... whoa!

7/31 GRAVITY CHECK: Rose to 10/1.015, so the cranberries did add some sugar!

8/1 RACKED TO 3RD:
Another gravity check shows that it went down to 9.6/1.012, racked it off of the cranberries and oak. This tastes amazing! Still a little sweeter than I wanted, but has a nice warming dry finish. Can't wait for Thanksgiving!

8/7 GRAVITY CHECK: Down to 9.2/1.010

8/22 GRAVITY CHECK: Down even further now - 8.2/1.003
Planning on bottling soon, going to do the 750mL belgian corked bottles like I did for the saison. And then we'll keep our mitts off of these until Thanksgiving!

9/19 BOTTLING:
Was brewing my pumpkin ale today and had some time to bottle this batch.  I tried to used as many Belgian 750mL bottles as possible, and a few 12 oz.

11/10 TASTING:
Did a thai dinner tonight with Dave & Megan and decided to pop one of these open to see how it's coming along.  TRAGEDY... it appears that they're not carbonated at all.  :-(  Did something happen or did I pull a major faux pas and forget to add priming sugar before I bottled :-S  Oh god, say it ain't so. 

11/11 RE-TASTING:
Tried another bottle, this one was a 12 oz capped bottle - same result... nothing at all.  BARNACLES!!!  I'm going to test one more and see if it produces the same results.  If it does, then I'm going to have to do one of two things: 1) open every bottle up, throw some carb tabs in, then recap/recork and wait another couple of weeks.  2) open every bottle up, mix up some priming sugar, and distribute between all of them OR pour them all back into the racking bucket and re-rack to bottle, cap/cork, and wait a couple of weeks.  I would just choose the former of the two options, but I've experienced some problems recently with the carb tabs I have.  I carb tabbed some Oktoberfests and Brown Rice Lagers and they came out flat and had chunks of the tabs floating around.  Then there's the question of adding more yeast.  Oh, and there's the added bonus of not having enough corks and hoods to re-cork this batch.  I'll have to either drive an hour to Plainfield to buy more, or order some online.  Did I mention how much this sucks?