|BACKGROUND|

New Year, new beer, who dis? Officially, this was the first brew of the new year. That seems odd, since I’ve already posted like 3 times already, but… This is officially the start of the new year beers. At least it kinda lines up with the Chinese New Year.

Last September, I actually had some free time from the rigors of the food industry in the form of Labor Day weekend, which sparked a bit of an impromptu day trip down to good ol’ Richmond, VA. Naturally, this was a beercation, so my two goals for the day were The Veil and The Answer. I mean, don’t get me wrong, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts had a pretty dece Art Nouveau exhibit going on, but I had my priorities in order. At least, I think so. My girlfriend may slightly disagree on that.

The Veil was… fine. Living close enough to Tired Hands, I’m well versed in hypetrains, hazyboyz, and artificial scarcity, so The Veil was pretty much what I expected and still managed to somewhat let me down. But The Answer… Got. DAYUM.

An’s doing some magic down there and, even just forgoing the brewery, Mekong’s killing it on food and draft.

But after hearing all the hype, I was looking for the juice… or rather, the Joose. The IPAs are great, but I’ll admit that after so many years, I’m just getting burnt out on the “how much hops can we cram in this beer?” game. The real ticket at the Answer is the Scoops and Joose series. I’ve heard that, at least initially, the goses and the B-Dubs were not brewed in house, but rather blends from Anderson Valley and Hardywood Park. And by blends, I mean that they use a keg as a Randall system and mix the bases with a metric fuckton of fruit purees and other adjuncts. Not that this is a bad thing. Although, it is the reason that RateBeer doesn’t allow the Andall series to get rated on their site.

Personally, I think it’s a case where the sum is definitely greater than the parts.

Regardless, it was a point where I decided that it was about time to try and recreate the marvelous ambrosia of The Old Dominion. Instead of just blending a beer with a massive quantity of puree and making bottle bombs, I decided it was going to require a slightly different approach. Also, I was going to make the beer, not just get a couple growlers and roll with it.

Them Digits

Batch Size: 5.5 gallons

Mash Temp: 150F for 60 min.

Boil Time: 30 min.

Batch Efficiency: 74%

Original Gravity: 1.044 // 11.0 P

Final Gravity: 1.012 // 3.1 P

Estimated ABV: 4.2% (+ maybe .6 – 1.2% from the fruit)

IBUs: 7

Color: 6.8 EBC // 3.4 SRM

Recipe

Malts

4# White Wheat | 48.5%

3# Belgian Floor-Malted Pislner | 36.5%

1# Torrified Wheat |12%

.5# Lactose| 3%

Hops

1 oz. Hallertau Mittlefruh @ 15 min.

Yeast

Bootleg Biology Sour Weapon P (Fermented at 90F for 3 days)

Safale US-05 (Fermented at 70F until termination)

Water Shit

5 mL 88% Lactic Acid

1/2 Tbsp Calcium Chloride

Spices and Stuff

1 kg Guava puree

1 kg Mandarin Orange puree

1 kg Mango puree

1 kg White Peach puree

1 oz. Baileen Sea Salt

.5 oz. Ground Cumin

|BREW LOG|

It was cold and rainy, which wasn’t a particularly great way to start of the new year. This meant that we were going to have to try something new – brewing in the basement. Turns out this is a pretty sweet gig, aside from having to run up and down the stairs.

The simplicity of the grain bill was only offset by the sheer amount of fruit puree that I decided I wanted to use for the batch. I spent probably twice as much on the goods as I did on the grist.

Milling the grains was a breeze while I was heating up the mash water, all 3 gallons of it. The new thing that I’ve started to do is some light water modifications. That sounds fancy, but as I still haven’t pony’d up for a complete water analysis of the normal tap, which passes through a softener, I started to do about a 50/50 of tap and RO. Knowing that the water is passing through an RO filter, which is tripping almost everything out, I opted to lightly add some CaCl to re-add some hardness and also a bit of lactic acid to help bring the mash pH down to a more pleasurable range for the enzymes. Also, pretty much doing this blind, except I was working loosely off of Bertus’ advice on building a basic water profile from RO/Distilled water.

Mash went off without any hitches. It was definitely a bit alarming to see my mash tun only about a third of the way full, rather than the usual half to 3/4, especially when collecting first runnings netted a loose gallon and a half, two tops. As far as experimenting with the water additions and the pH, it turns out that was to the benefit of the beer, as I ended up hitting a solid 5.36 along with being right on target temp wise. The stars were aligning, it seemed.

As with my typical souring process, I cut the boil to 30 minutes, enough to sterilie the wort and drive of any DMS from the wheat and pilsner malt, although I feel like that decidedly less of an issue than it used to be.

The challenge in this boil, to me, came down to what I was going to do as far as hopping. Goses and Berliners are traditionally done as a sour mash, and even if it’s a kettle sour, you can still hop it lightly. Given my track record as far as sours and how they interact with the Pedio blend I’ve been using of late to sour my beers, I was going to give it on last shot of seeing how the critters fared against some light hopping. I eventually decided to do a light hopping with some Hallertau Mittelfruh, keeping it simple and light.

I had also decided to add just a teeny bit of lactose into the beer. While this might not be as traditional for the inspiration for the beer, I wanted to have a bit of sweetness to balance out the tartness of the base beer and the fruit, especially with such a low mash temp, knowing that most of the beer would ferment out. I opted for only a quarter pound of lactose in the boil, most assuredly not worried about trying to add body to the beer, what with the majority of it being wheat and wheat accessories.

I also had to do a decent amount of research into the spicing for this beer. Not that it was particularly intricate – it’s sea salt and coriander – but the point that I really had no idea how much to add. Turns out, everyone has their own idea on how much to add. I ended up coming in between the suggestion of former Bube’s brewer Cole Baker, BYO’s gose recipe, and Homebrew Academy’s gose. Personally, I think that I somehow flipped my numbers, seeing that two out of three say only 1/2 ounces of salt and up to an ounce of coriander, outside of HBA’s version, but… I dunno. I can’t complain too loudly about how it turned out. If we’re getting technical, I also didn’t use a half ounce of cracked coriander seed. In fact, there was a frantic scramble upon realizing that there was no coriander seed or ground coriander in the house, which ended up with my improvisation with a different type of ground coriander, cumin. I mean, they’re close, but not really the same. This particular bottle is probably old as fuck, to boot. That’s not a retro throwback label. Still smelled really fruity and tasty, though. While I’m used to using cumin in Indian and Mexican cooking, this smelled completely different from what is in my cabinet at home. So, I rolled the dice and used it as a substitute. With my basic knowledge of spices, I knew that they were in the same familiy, and a cursory Google search confirmed what I had hoped – you can usually substitute cumin for coriander – well, at least in cooking. So continues my longstanding tradition of iprovising on the fly.

Now, this is the fun part of the brew – Das Fruit. While it was all fun and games to say “I’m using almost 9 pounds of fruit in a 5 gallon batch of beer”, logistically it was interesting to note that, volumetrically, I was also using a gallon of puree. I can only guess that I’m pretty on point with the Answer beers where 1/6 of this beer was actively fruit. Just instead of being a blend directly to the glass with a non-live yeast component, mine was going to get fermented.

All in all, the boil was pretty much no frills. I was shooting for a good deal of haze in the beer, which meant no whirlfloc, but I also did rinse the puree containers with wort and poured it back in, hoping to get a little bit of pectin haze as well.

Chilling ran through pretty quickly and checking the gravity gave me a little happy surprise that my efficiency was well above usual, which I’d like to attribute to doctoring with the water chemistry, but if anything it might have just been having a good mash. The OG ended up clocking in at 1.044, which was right about where I had estimated it should have been. I also ended up collecting about 5.5 gallons of wort as well, meaning that if I had pushed it harder with a longer boil to get to 5, it could theoretically gotten a bit higher even.

Now, there is a small caveat onto my calculating abv and the final actual product. With the sugars from the purees, I could have netted anywhere from an additional .6% to 1.2% in bonus alcohol, since these were added after taking the OG reading post boil. The fruit was already in the carboy. Looking at the nutritional facts, even, there is a small split. Two of the purees are purely fruit and two have a small amount of inverted sugar added to them. It makes sense, these are actually professional food-grade puree for chefs and restaurants. The breakdown looks a bit like this:

Guava – 155g sugar Mandarin – 200g Sugar Mango – 150g sugar White Peach 150g sugar 655g sugar > 23.4 oz. sugar > 1.46# sugar

There’s not much available, so far as the hard delineation of what sugar is added and what is just the straight fruit, so basing it from using my brewing software, I could have guessed fermentability based on either the invert sugar numbers or the straight fruit numbers. That either means:

Invert Sugar 1.46# Invert Sugar = ~ .012 SG > ~.003 FG = ~1.2% abv Straight Fruit 1.46# Fruit = ~.006 SG > ~.003 FG = ~.6%

So, I guess the beer is technically closer to about 5% abv, on average, but that’s also not accounting for what the Pedio chewed up, which I’m not 100% sure contributes to abv in the end. In lieu of not having a hard number, I decided that I’m not counting that too much towards the final abv.

Primary fermentation was at 90F for 3 days with the Pedio doing the damn thing. After that, the carboy heater was turned off and the beer dropped pretty fast over night down to 70-72F, which was just fine for pitching a little rehydrated US-05 onto and letting the beer ride, which was only another 5 days, tops. The beer got another week or so of rest before bottling arrived. No blow off activity that whole time was a solid indicator that fermentation was done.

Bottling day gravity check showed the beer finishing about where it should, clocking in at 1.011, roughly the estimate of where it should have.

The beer smelled absolutely stupid fruity. Just citrus on citrus. Even out of the cylinder, it was almost closer to making a brass monkey with grapefruit juice.

Shooting for a kolsch-y level of carb, I used 4.6 oz. of sucrose (~2/3 cup) to make a simple syrup for priming. Final yield was a little over 5 gallons of beer, not quite the full 5.5 like I had hoped for but… fruit puree can be a little difficult to deal with when racking out. And I’m pretty sure this is the beer I almost fell upstairs carrying, so… I might’ve shaken a bit back into the solution from the nice cake at the bottom.

After that, it was the usual waiting game. Then, showtime.

Tasting Notes

Color-wise, this beer is gorgeous. It’s a brilliant, opaque yellow-gold. It looks almost more akin to a NEIPA, but it stops just shy on the haze. The head is a beautiful, fluffy white, and it retains like a motherlicker. I actually “bottled” some of this in one of those fancy draft growlers, since I got one for Christmas and I felt obligated to use it, and the creamy foam put the pussy on the chainwax. I mean, with all the wheat, I’d really have had to fuck something up for that to not happen.

Remember how I said the smell and flavor was back at bottling? Yeah, well, carbonation has only done the beer serious justice. Opening and pouring a bottle ends up just kicking all sorts of crazy fruits into the air. Shit’s almost like huffing a bag of sour skittles mixed into a shot of Zima on crack. It’s bright, citrusy, and a little beer-y, but only slightly. After spending $40 on puree, I’d be a little salty (no pun intended) if that didn’t translate into the finished product. Underneath all that gnarly fruit is the hint of Berliner, that biscuit-y, wheat-y goodness, followed by the lactic tang tugging at the nosehairs.

The taste is where things get a little interesting. I had initially opened a bottle after a week of conditioning and, while it was carbed, I definitely thought it was still a bit green and needed to continue on a bit. This was, however, at the holiday party at work, which was going to be a great proving grounds, since many of us are well versed in beer, as well as some other homebrewers. Ultimately, my boss pointed out that there was a slight flavor, kinda like a phenol, that he picked up. While I agreed with him, I wrote it off as the beer not being fully conditioned yet or just something thrown by the Pedio. However, writing this post has made it clear what it is. It’s the cumin. To be completely honest, I forgot about improvising that twist until I started writing this post and pulled up the salt/cumin picture and remembered freaking out. That pretty much explained everything. To clarify, it’s not off. It still has all the trappings of coriander. However, I will admit, it stops shy of that wonderful peachy tone you get in beers like Bayischner-Bahnhoff’s gose (which I would call my benchmark). In the link I had listed previously, it makes sense. I get that “darker”, less sweet and bright quality compared to the coriander. But you know what, I don’t hate it. They only truly negative thing I could say would be to ask “how much better would this have been with real coriander?”

Maybe a little less salt. It’s not offensive but it’s slightly past “minerally”. I do think that the fruit helps reign in a lot of what could have been more terrible boo-boos on this one.

Aside from that, the mouthfeel is on point. It’s got that nice, full wheat beer body and a spritzy carbonation level. combining that little hat trick results in a super drinkable and refreshing beer. I think the utlimate fuck-up here was that I don’t really want to drink this in the throes of the winter. I want this for those hot ass dog days of summer.

Overall, I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. Is it Joose? No, but it’s close enough. Again, considering that I can’t just blend in the fruit puree, to get as close as possible with flavor, mouthfeel, and look, I’ll take it. It’s tasty, there’s room for improvement, but ultimately I can dig it. Looking back, I’m glad that I didn’t use a whole ounce of cumin, but now that I know the base recipe is solid, I’m looking forward to doing another batch of gose, just a little closer to the infernal days of heat.