Brewsflash: Gose coming up!

A brewsflash! My first attempt at resurrecting an old German beer.

Ah, those wacky Germans.

If only they'd been more consistently wacky all the time...

Apart from the odd attempt at establishing various kinds of New World Order, they also managed to be responsible for the most oft-misrepresented beer law in the history of oft-misrepresented beer laws.

Die/Der/Das Reinheitsgebot.
Verdammt doch mahl!

In a nutshell, the Beer Purity Law was an attempt of the Duke of Bavaria to put a stop to various brewing malpractices, like competing with the bakers' Guilds for rye and wheat, and not paying hefty hops taxes.

Health concerns were not an issue.

Nutshelling things further, the law listed all(*) ingredients sactioned for use in beer:

Ganz besonders wollen wir, dass forthin allenthalben in unseren Städten, Märkten und auf dem Lande zu keinem Bier mehr Stücke als allein Gersten, Hopfen und Wasser verwendet und gebraucht werden sollen.

*) Three. Yes. Pasteur not having been born yet, yeast was not listed. Which is only one of many reason so many people still think German beer is not, actually, beer.

All debate and dispute about the current(*) state of the Reinheitsgebot aside, its instatement led directly to the extinction of a number of local beer styles, relying on anything but barley, hops and water.

*) Oh come on! What do you think a weizen is made of then? It's a Bavarian law; Germany didn't exist in 1487.

The very existence of the Reinheitsgebot has led to all kinds of preconceived misunderstandings about German beer, not even the least harmful being one of assumed (duh) purity. Teufel, unless you explicitly prohibit the adulteration of beer with additives, then surely it will be better, nein?

Nein.

History has taught us that, while adding arsenic, lead and strychnine might not have been the smartest move, there are hundreds of other additives which actually do add extra value to a brew.

Which brings us to the nearly extinct Leipziger Gose, which is flavoured with coriander and salt.

One would see why Gose's use of Salt has always been an exception
to the Reinheitsgebot's "Don't add things to beer" rule.

Coriander is hardly novel. Most tripels and the ubiquitous wit all use it as a dominant flavouring agent, but salt, now there's an ingredient few people associate with beer.

Unless it comes covered in pretzels.

The brewers of the town of Leipzig, however, have been using salt in their brewing process since the 16th century. Being compulsively intrigued by oddball beers, I decided to brew one myself.

Gose is traditionally a spontaneously fermented beer, meaning no yeast is pitched into it by the brewer Instead, the microbial fauna which is naturally present in the brew house is allowed to inoculate the brew. Sponteously. Hence the term. This will sour the beer, pretty much the way a lambic is soured.
My guess is that the salt was added to offset the acidity, which must have been quite fierce in historic versions. Also, Gose was allowed to ferment in the unstoppered bottle, with a natural plug of yeast eventually sealing the bottle's typical long neck.

History being in the past, current versions are properly sealed.

Also, traditional Gose is/was brewed with at least 50% of malted wheat. In case you've never brewed with wheat (which is hardly something to be ashamed of, all things considered): that's a lot of wheat.

My gose has 60%  malted wheat, 35%  of Belgian pilsner malt, and 5% of acidic malt. After mashing, the acidity was barely detectable, so I decided to sour wort my batch.

Let me explain.

Normally, you want to boil the wort together with hops and then either produce a clean beer (i.e. not a sour) or else you introduce a souring agent to it (Lactobacillus and/or Pediococcus). The risk of the latter option is that anything coming in contact with your wort/beer from there on downstreams can and will become "contaminated" by souring bacteria, making it hard to ever produce clean beers again.
Hence the cheat-skeet-approach of souring the wort prior to the boil, which will 1) give you more control over the souring process and just how far you want to take it and 2) kill off all the added bacteria during the eventuel boil and hence reduce the contamination risks

I soured my wort by inoculating it with the most readily available source of beer bacteria I could lay my hands on.

A vial of Lacto culture.

I'd used the technique in a prior batch of sour-saison-ish brew which came out quite nice, with an light apple-like tartness I'd not have achieved sans all those Cantillon critters.
Souring wort prior to the boil is a not-uncommon shortcut to producing sour beers. However, there are risks involved: the souring agents (bacteria of various genera present in the otherwise tasty geuze) can run rampant in the wort and produce off flavours.

Which, in the case of my unfortunate gose, they did. After 48 hours in the warm wort, the various geuze bugs had managed to produce a small amount of lactic acid (which is good), and quite a bit of butyric acid (which is slightly less than good).

Ladies and gentlem, butyric acid.
Butyric acid, meet the Internet.

Butyric acid is what makes rancid butter smell the way it does.
It is also the lingering flavour persisting in the oral cavity after a good bout of vomiting.
And, perhaps most telling, the Sea Shepherd Crew used to deploy Butyric Acid Stink Bombs to discourage Japanese whalers from collecting "scientific specimina".

Suffice to say: a chemical which can put the crew of a floating abattoir off their lunch is not something you want in your beer.
Even if it's a gose.

Regardless of this minor setback (*), I decided to stick to the plan and boil the wort, thereby killing all the bugs and arresting the souring process (I still refuse to call it spoiling).

*) BrewSpeak for Fridge-Kicking Disaster

Now I had boiled wort which no longer smelled like I threw up in it, and a house which reeked just like the wort did before I boiled all the stink out of it.

...even with all the windows open...
Sorry 'bout that, dear neighbours.

For the better part of the week, I'd encounter pockets of foul air throughout the house, as if I were traipsing through the dank corridors of an aeons-old Lovecraftian catacomb.

But hark! I now had beer which no longer ponged.

Much.

To my dismay, a week into primary fermentation with BRY97, the foul smell returned, and I was finally contemplating that maybe it was time to dump the batch. But call me foolhardy, or stubborn, or just plain stupid, but I just couldn't kill this baby just yet.

After doing some research, I found out that one of Brettanomyces' more peculiar metabolic properties is its ability to convert organic acids (like the foul-smelling butyric acid) to their ethanol esters (like the pineapple-scented ethylbutyrate). So, slighty desperate but in good scientific spirits, I pitched a pack of B. bruxellensis (Wyeast 5112) and tried to forget about the beer for the next couple of months.

But I couldn't.

Three months into this tertiary fermentation, the vomity smell of butyric acid started to disappear. In its place came new and tantalising scents...

...like Parmsean...

..and fragrances...

...like BandAid...

So yes, Brett was cleaning up my beer by getting rid of unwanted flavours, only by replacing them with other unwanted smells. Hardly the success I'd been hoping for.
Keeping in mind that Brett is a slow but versatile grazer, and that You Can't Hurry Beer, I kept the beer in the carboy, where it still resides to this day. The beer will be a year old in June, and is still developing, with the icky flavours gradually being replaced by more complex, and, really, more tasty ones.
Whether this Cellar Dwellar of mine will ever become something halfway potable remains to be seen, but it's been a fascinating adventure for me so far.

The Missus and the Kids call the beer Puke Beer. Myself, I'm still looking for a name befitting its technical heritage.
Gore Gose is still a running candidate.

I'll be sure to keep y'all update on any further developments.

Until then,

Greetz

Jo