I suppose it is time to talk about another new beer! As many of our followers have noticed, there have been a lot of changes to Blue Pants' offerings in the last year. Going all the way back to last August, we bottled our Oktoberfest for the first time as our Fall seasonal. Then, we threw a curveball into our winter mix and offered our Chocolate Oatmeal Porter. After the success of those two and our need for a Spring seasonal (which had previously been Spare Pair before it was promoted to a year round beer), we introduced our German Style Pilsener. With the success of all of our new seasonal beers, we realized that it was time to make a change to our year round line up and we recently introduced our Hopbursted IPA, a much improved Pale Ale, and an Amber Ale (which shipped this week). The feedback we have received on all our new beers has been fantastic, but it made us realize a flaw in our rotation, and possibly the biggest challenge that we have seen in my 3 years with the brewery... The summer seasonal.
Slip Rose Strawberry Saison had been our summer seasonal since my first day at the brewery. In fact, it was the first beer that I helped bottle on my first day of work. It has always had a really unique fan base and we have always had some people that have been extremely passionate about their enjoyment of Slip Rose. However, it has also received a lot of criticism for its subtle strawberry flavor. The strawberry was fermented in the beer and the contribution from the fruit was mostly a light tartness. Without using artificial strawberry flavoring, we don't have the capability of leaving a sweet strawberry flavor in the beer due to equipment constraints, but we have always been against the use of artificial strawberry flavoring in the beer. We realized that with how well respected our other seasonal's have been, that it might be time to explore other options for our summer beer.
At first, we thought we might just tweak the Slip Rose recipe and make a new strawberry wheat beer, but the concern was that we would still have the same issue with people expecting more strawberry flavor. So when we scratched that idea, we realized that the challenge was much greater than expected. After all the beers we have released in the last year, we realized that we wanted to brew another beer style that is associated with high quality, but is still easy drinking for the hot summer months, excites the craft beer enthusiasts, and doesn't scare away the casual beer drinker. We discussed hoppy wheat beers and saisons, but thought they would scare away casual drinkers. We then discussed cream ales and blondes, but thought the craft beer geeks would scoff at them as if they were macro beer alternatives not worthy of a try.
After spending many hours discussing the merits of various summer seasonals that have proven to be commercially successful, we discussed the idea of a wheat beer, brewed with peaches, that is lightly tart. Essentially, a Berliner Weisse brewed with peaches. The idea originally scared the sales team as they thought that I was telling them I wanted to brew a sour beer (which would never sell in very high volume, but would be great for limited releases) However, a traditional Berliner is not assertively sour, but rather it is pleasantly tart, which is perfect for a thirst quenching beverage on a hot summer day. The use of peach would give an extra dimension of flavor to the beer with just a hint of peach flavor. Once the sales team jumped on board, I realized what a mess I had gotten the brewing team into.
The big challenge from the brewing side was to develop a method to acidify the beer in a way that would not contaminate the rest of the brewery. Most brewers would take the easy way out and just use food grade lactic acid post-fermentation to achieve the desired level of acidity. I hated that idea because it felt a little like cheating, but a beer brewed that way does not yield the full range of flavors that is found in a lacto fermentation. In a sense, I think beers brewed that way taste artificial. The other common way would be to do a sour mash, but then we would be severely limited in our production capability and the results would be likely inconsistent. The other way would be to do a lacto fermentation in the fermenter with a normal yeast strain working together... No way in hell I was going to do that.
To solve the problem, I decided to utilize a sour wort technique where I did a mash and sparge like
normal. I then pasteurized the wort by boiling for 10 minutes and chilled it while transferring into food grade IBC totes. In the tote, we added lactobacillus using lacto that is naturally occurring on grains. 14 hours later, I am now able to move the wort back to the kettle, boil, and proceed pretty much like normal for any other Brewday, with the only exception being that we will be adding nearly 500lbs of peach puree to the fermenter. Now, when we rebrew it next week, I will need 8 IBC totes filled with wort for souring.
Sounds like a good plan right? Remember the mess for the brewing team though? Using this method, we will be constantly monitoring the pH of the wort, coming in throughout the night all summer long. This time it took us 14 hours to acidify, but next time, we might not be so lucky. If the wort is ready to be boiled at 2:00 a.m., we come in and brew at 2:00. I won't lie, it is going to suck. But what fun would brewing be without a challenge once in a while?
