All-Day Beer Recipe: Gose

This post is part of a series on “All-Day Beer“.  Designed to let you enjoy your favorite beverage throughout the day while still remaining an upright and functional human.  You can check out the full set here.

Last time, we were talking about what makes a beer refreshing.  So here’s an example of a beer with those qualities.

I have a thing for obscure beer styles and I haven’t been able to find a commercial version of this one locally.  Gose (not to be confused with Gueuze) is a German wheat ale brewed with coriander and salt.  It’s somewhere between a Wit and a BerlinerWeiss.

Coriander gives it a bit of citrusey-ness even without the orange peel.  Salt adds more of a background flavor – this version doesn’t taste “salty”.

It finishes fairly dry – under 1.010 – and has a light sourness or tartness.  A little like a lemonade but not nearly as sour as a Berliner Weiss.  And then a high level of carbonation to play up the dry and tart components.

This recipe is a modified version of one that appears in Radical Brewing.  It calls for Acid malt – which is malt that has been allowed to sour before drying – to achieve the sour flavors.

I didn’t think it was quite strong enough so I added another 15 ml of Lactic Acid to the keg.  To figure how much Lactic Acid to add, get a measured glass of beer and add the acid a few drops at a time until you get the flavor you want.  Then multiply by ~50 glasses in a keg.

You could also use a Lactobacillus culture (Wyeast 5335 or White Labs WLP677) after primary fermentation is complete.  I was kind of worried that might over-do it but I’ll probably try it at some point.

In reading up on the style, there’s not much consistency in how the few commercial examples are brewed – so feel free to adjust it to your liking.

There’s no extract version because the high amount of Acid Malt needs enzymes to convert.   If you want to brew an extract version, drop the Acid malt and use a 50% Wheat/50% Pilsner malt blend then sour with either Lactic Acid or Lactobacillus culture.

Gose

Tagged as: All Day Beer, german, gose, recipe, salt