Gose vs Wild Ale

Ugh, with a few Zantac, I can't imagine finishing half a can, but everyone likes what they like, sour and or funk isn't my thing. Funny because individually I like salty, and I like sour, but together in a beer it just doesn't work for me.

 

Yeah, I don't understand the gose craze either. I got through about four sips of a sixpoint jammer this summer before I had to stop being polite and get rid of it. People seem to love the stuff though.

 

LOL. Take it easy, he's just dropping some knowledge. I remember when we first started brewing Berliner weisse about 3-4 years ago and got a copy of "Die Berliner Weisse" but had to find someone who spoke German to translate some of it. That book would have been a game changer a few years ago if it had ever actually been translated to English. But since kettle souring is popular now, I know most brewers will never actually brew the style with traditional methods since they are riskier in the cellar. We still do ours with a yeast/lacto primary and age it with Brett for a few months before release. Modern kettle-soured beers miss all the great complexity you get from the old method, which is too bad. It's quick and easy but not as rewarding in the end. SARA is a brewery right now that I think is making great gose and BW with a more traditional technique.

 

Most of the descriptions of brewing methods in "Die Berliner Weisse" I've translated and posted on my blog.

 

Ron, you are an invaluable resource to the brewing community.

Cheers to you sir!!

 

Well I mean wild ale should very specifically require that the ale was spontaneously fermented, whereas gose does not require spontaneous fermentation.. They are very controlled commercially.

 

How many American Wild Ales are spontaneously fermented? Some, but not that many.

 

So then the question becomes how many american wild ales are mislabeled when being called wild ales? If they are fermented using yeast and bacteria from a lab that came in a package and are fermented in closed vessels than they really aren't wild. I'm just saying that gose doesn't require spontaneous fermentation and wild ale does. If breweries label "wild" when they in fact used controlled fermentation than they are lying. Thats another topic.

 

So by this logic, any wolf, tiger or lion born in captivity no longer has the genetic character, dietary habits and excretatory by-products that made its parents wild.

 

Tart is synonymous with sour, so I don't think something can have tartness but no sour qualities.

 

Yeast evolves much faster than lions.

 

It seems to me that wild =/= sour/tart/or any particular flavor for that matter; is wild not synonymous with spontaneous fermentation, a technical term referring to the fermentation process rather than a style per se?

Granted, spontaneously fermented beers are virtually always going to be sour and/or tart to a high degree, which is why the fermentation process has become figuratively synonymous with those tasting notes. It's therefore justified to make statements such as ''wild/spontaneously fermented beers are sour/tart'', because empirically this is (virtually) always the case. Theoretically, however, it might be possible that a beer be wild/spontaneously fermented and not taste tart or sour, through some freak or chance fermentation. Or perhaps that's technically impossible, I don't know enough about yeasts and such to be sure (please correct me if I'm wrong).

Anyway, my understanding is that, as others have pointed out, the closest relative to Gose is Berliner Weiße. Neither of those styles have been typically spontaneously fermented for at least a century (if not much longer), as far as I know. That's why I might see myself considering Gose to be a sour beer in the broadest sense of the term (in that it tastes sour), but wouldn't place it anywhere near the same family as wilds/Lambics/all other spontaneously fermented beers, as sour as those beers might incidentally taste. My two cents' worth.

Edit: to be a bit clearer in my thinking, the way I see it is that if you managed to isolate all the yeasts and bacteria from a batch of wild/spontaneous beer and use those to ferment a new batch in a controlled environment, you may create a beer that is identical in character, but would still not be wild/spontaneous. Does that make sense to anyone else?

 

Yes, the generations do come along much faster.

Which is why yeast banks preserve original cultures of the strains they bank and sell. Some breweries set time/frequency limits on how often they will reuse yeast from one batch to another before going back to the yeast bank for more of the original culture they want used in a paticular beer.

 

No.

 

Propositional logic. If the label says the beer is wild, than the beer must use wild yeast (and bacteria). Contrapositive: If the beer doesn't use wild yeast, than the label doesn't say the beer is wild. I don't know how either of these things had anything to do with lions and wolves.

Also look here: http://www.whitelabs.com/beer/pro/listings none are called wild sooo... wild ale is mislabeled if it uses only these (as an example).

 

How many American Wild Ales are spontaneously fermented? Some, but not that many.

Then again, the Brettanomyces in Berliner Weisse wasn't pitched. In fact brewers didn't even know it was there until the 1980's. I'd count that as a spontaneous fermentation. The same was true of Ritterguts Gose when produced at Bauer in Leipzig. When production was moved to a sterile modern brewery, it lost its Brettanomyces character.

 

You talking about Bretta Weisse? Or do you guys do other Berliners? If the former, I gotta say, that's about as tasty a version as I've ever had, and your description of the brewing process maybe helps me understand why (and what I oughtta be researching/looking for in other commercial versions).

 

That's the one. Hottenroth is done similarly but I think all stainless instead of oak.

 

Somewhat lazy question here, as I'm sure I could research myself, but is it safe to assume that historical Berliners were aged in oak (or some wood barrel)? When did stainless start getting used in (German or otherwise) brewing applications?