strawberry rhubarb berliner questions

You need to provide a lot more information than you have. What percentage beer are you aiming for? How many gallons is your target volume? What's your target volume & OG/FG?

 

As is so often the case, @OldSock has written about this, check out his notes on his rhubarb Berliner weisse. It looks as though he used about 1.5 pounds per gallon and was pleased with the results. (He did not, however, add strawberries.) He also included information on the strains of brett that were in the beer.

 

both strawberry and rhubarb are very fleeting flavors in a beer. Ive personally used rhubarb in a bweiss to help sour it up a bit, and while it did a great job at that it didnt add much flavor of its own (2#/3gal)

strawberries dont usually actually have much flavor of their own (unless it is a soft homegrown variety) and even then you will need copious amounts to get a good flavor, and they also can add quite a bit of acidity

I would suggest you use both fruits and a brett strain but no lactic bacteria to start, then if its not sour enough for you, add some pedio and let it ride for a bit

 

All right @ryane but that does not sound much like a Berliner weisse beer. @OldSock used twice as much rhubarb as you did so maybe you just have to use a lot to get the rhubarb character. Anyway @primrose54 if you follow the link I included and you click around from it a bit (he includes some good links as well), I think you will find some pretty good information on brewing a Berliner with rhubarb.

 

Purely anecdotal, but I just made a dessert recently with both rhubarb and strawberry at 1:1 ratio. It was delicious as it was, but if I were trying to balance out those two particular flavors, I would have favored strawberries 2:1.

 

As to the links in Oldsocks blog, one of those happens to be my rhubarb b-weiss

He (oldsock) didnt think that the rhubarb added too much acid to his beer, but mine got quite a bit additional acidity after adding the rhubarb, and while that's just two points of data and everyone's palate is balanced differently, Ive tasted Oldsocks beers and he has tried mine and I dont think that between the two of us we are too far off on our perception of sourness. This makes me think that we actually had very different experiences with rhubarb in our beers

One thing that might be useful in a beer with rhurbarb is using a malolactic bacteria to convert some of the malic acid to lactic which is considered a "softer" acid, it might be that the culture he had in his beer did that, whereas mine lacked that type of bacteria

One last thought which Ive toyed with in the past is to do a strawberry rhubarb syrup to add, and I'd make it with very very little sugar and mostly fruit, which would give you a big flavor addition in the glass

 

Ah okay, didn't realize you were the same person who wrote that blog post. I like your syrup suggestion, but actually it occurs to me that maybe the best of both worlds is to add rhubarb to the beer and then to use a strawberry syrup. That way the drinker can control the ratio of strawberry to rhubarb, and personally I like the idea of getting some extra acidity in the beer from the rhubarb. Also, while rhubarb is easy to get all summer (right?) strawberry season is coming to a close soon, so you could make a bunch of syrup now and then enjoy it for the rest of the summer.

This feels like such a good idea to me that I'm considering doing it myself.

 

Awesome ideas fellas. What if you did one pound of berries for each gallon? or more with syrup? Or is a puree a more adequate description of what you're talking about?

Thanks guys

 

I used 5# of grape plus 1 quart of juiced grapes from a grape vine in my backyard that is allegedly cabernet franc grapes. It added noticeable tartness but was not really grapey or all that wine-like

 

Edit: 4.5 gallon batch.

 

So I have some sobering news to report. I bought some nice strawberries at the farmer's market today, and I made a syrup, in anticipation of using it in a rhubarb Berliner. I have to say, though, while the strawberries were excellent, the syrup is disappointing. Maybe I could have done it a bit differently, but I think it's just very hard to capture the essence of fresh strawberries in a syrup. The syrup I made is definitely red, and it has some flavor beyond mere sweetness, but it is a far cry from the flavor I was hoping for.

So, sadness. I think other berries (such as raspberries) are far more promising, because their flavor is easier to capture in syrup form.

 

Don't feel bad minder better. Try it again with whole berries or a larger amount . Might need to highly saturate the mix.

 

how did you make the syrup, and what kind of berries? Smaller softer varieties tend to have the most flavor, while big firm ones usually are more sweet/sour

I would cut the top off, core out any white, blend them up very smooth with a tiny bit of water/lemon juice and add a small amout of sugar to taste

You are very right, usually I add a few blackberries to my strawberries to help retain some berry flavor when cooking with them

 

Yeah, my mistake may have been using far too much sugar. I boiled 2 cups of sugar in 1 cup of water and then added about 5 cups of sliced strawberries, simmering for 15 minutes. (This is, very roughly, what Joy of Cooking told me to do.) [Edited to add: I used fresh strawberries from the farmer's market, they were all different sizes, but I frequently tasted a slice of the berry before adding it, and I'm confident these were flavorful berries.] My concern with using less sugar is that the syrup might have a shorter shelf-life, and I'm going to want this to last for a while. I suppose I could freeze it in ice-cube trays, put the cubes into a freezer bag, and then thaw however many I need when I want to use it. I don't know. The thing is that the strawberry flavor was just different from the way fresh strawberries taste, and I'm not sure I'd like it even if it were considerably less sweet. My suspicion is that strawberries are not the best choice for a syrup, although I admit I would need to do more experimentation to be confident about it.

On the other hand I've had really excellent raspberry syrups before, in other contexts, and I'm pretty sure I can make one that I would be happy with. So at this point I am wondering how a rhubarb Berliner weisse beer will go with raspberry syrup. Not too bad, I bet!