So we haven't done a video in a while
obviously with
everything that's been going on things
have been a little weird and hectic here
we've been
doing a lot of canning we've been doing
crowlers we've been doing
all sorts of things that we weren't
really planning on doing yet
but today we finally have a few minutes
to do something kind of fun
yeah it's a Friday afternoon all the
beers carbed in tanks ready for Monday's
canning run
and so we're drinking a little Berliner
Weisse. Little by Slowly batch number two
so yeah this is a no-boil Berliner
three-ish percent what pils,
malted wheat, and chit yeah pretty much
it
um and it's i as far as Berliner Weisses
go it's an interesting one it's got a
German strain of Brettanomyces it's mixed
ferment Lactobacillus not kettle soured
um but we on beers like this get a lot
of beer
um so rather than something like 14 or
15 kegs of an ipa we got like
21 or 22. there's not a lot of losses to
a bunch of dry hopping and
hardly any losses in the kettle yeah
you're not boiling so you don't have any
evaporation
um and because you don't boil you get
sort of like a doughy kind of graininess
to it that that
a little bit of lemon funk kind of gets
together. Yeah it's it's such a
Berliner Weisse is such a boring style
we've got nothing against kettle sours
we're bottling
we're canning one on Monday that's got
raspberries, and vanilla, and lime and
when you're throwing all those flavors
at something
you don't really need much complexity on
the back end and the base beer
but for a Berliner Weisse if you're not
adding a lot of fruit to it or something
that's when that no boil and that Brett
really sort of shine through
but we have a lot of it and so the plan
is
to have a little competition one of the
things we do here
at the brewery uh from time to time
basically every week
is to take one of the beers that we
already have and infuse it
flavor it you know a special dry hop
version a chocolate stout
a peanut butter IPA a jalapeno
whatever. I mean basically we call them
variants right and so you're taking
beer that's um fermented carbed packaged
and you're essentially jumping it into
another keg
with whatever yeah so usually
we've got sort of a collaborative effort
we talk about what ingredients will go
into a variant we'll order in advance
from
a spice store or from a brewing supplier
or
just go to the supermarket and get a
couple of limes or yeah whatever's in
season whatever's fresh
but today we're having a little old
challenge we've both got
10 bucks. We got 10.
and we're heading over to a dollar
store, Dollar Tree
and each of us can buy whatever we want
to make five gallons of beer so
Berliner Weisse sour beer probably plays
well with fruit flavors it might play
well
with um herbs or something like that
yeah it's it's it doesn't have a lot
going on so hopefully that the 10 dollar
limit doesn't hold us back too much
because you don't you don't need a lot
of
something else to to show in a beer like
this yeah that's one thing we found is
that the
the more characterful a beer is a
imperial stout with loads of roast
takes a lot more to flavor it and to
come through than a five percent brown
ale or something like that. But I haven't
been to a dollar store in a while and
i'm a little nervous all i'm going to
find is a
can of beans and black pepper so we'll
see. We may be re-recording this intro
if if it really doesn't work out but the
idea is that we'll each have
almost a week to make this happen
probably for next thursday
we'll have both beers on tap people can
come in try em
vote on the beers probably uh through uh
Untappd or another beer rating website
and
and whoever wins uh gets to get to drink
a beer yeah if we didn't talk about the
prize
and the loser gets fired
yeah this will be fun yeah let's let's
go shopping. Let's go shopping!
so we had a successful trip to the
dollar store
you know they had a lot of choices there
we were eyeballing what they had uh
non-alcoholic sangria
they had that was literally a dollar
everything was literally
yeah this is one of the dollar stores
where everything is really a dollar or
less that's kind of amazing
yeah it's not the normal kind of
ingredients we're accustomed to using
if we're making a fruit beer we usually
are buying fresh fruit from a local
uh farm or getting 100 you know
raspberry puree
or apple cider or something like that
and um not a lot of pure single
ingredient kind of things
a lot of the dollars real food i guess
yeah yeah a lot of processed stuff but
honestly like some of those flavors
are fun you know i think we all remember
being a kid
and having um juice blends
and uh you know things that are probably
uh you know juice almost in name only
and sometimes those flavors can
really bring you back to
that you know that summer at soccer camp
or that friend's house who's
whose mom would always do it you drink
lemon lime Gatorade yeah in fact i even
have one with not not this beer but the
one that that i put together is like a
flashback memory with that one yeah and
so I looked at the sangria I looked at a
couple other things and i ended up going
with
four things of mango nectar it was 20
mango puree and then water and sugar and
whatever
and then i got vanilla flavoring so
obviously probably something made from
wood pulp or something it
certainly smelled a little bit more like
root beer. Definitely had a root beer smell.
but my thought was you know sort of the
Berliner Weisse is really dry it's got
some acidity and having some fruitiness
and some sweetness is a it's a pretty
easy sell
and then the vanilla to add maybe a
little creaminess you know maybe cover
up for the fact that the fruit wasn't as
punchy as i want it to be
the the mango juice tended to be a
little i
kind of remind me of canned tuna when i
opened it a little bit oh
um so it wasn't maybe exactly what i was
hoping that doesn't smell like that in
there no and i think it was just
probably that pasteurized
carton kind of kind of thing yeah we
we just
had a little sip and off before we
started recording and it's kind of weird
that
it reminds me a little bit of a tootsie
roll pop
it's like a little bit of like a
chocolate thing in the in the back end
yeah i mean chocolate and vanilla are so
linked and then having
um that darker flavor whatever that
woodiness i think is is probably
and honestly tootsie roll pop has sort
of a light fruitiness to a non-specific
fruitiness normally
i could certainly see that candied
fruitiness yeah um so this was
about one gallon of juice in four
gallons of beer so for a five gallon
total
um and that's that's about what we've
found if you want to make just sort of
like
one of these like fruit juice uh
bombs that's a generally good place to
start
so what was your thought process what
what did anything else catch your eye
while you were walking around
i'll admit that i was thinking about
this the night prior
i've hit the mother lode and this
and using mr freezies came to mind right
away which i was a little bummed when we
first walked around for about 20 minutes
i couldn't find them yep but you can
find whatever you want at a dollar store
if you look long enough
and found what seven boxes of of mr
freezies
i'm sorry i think they were like generic
oh they're uh Italian ice i believe
generic Italian ice freeze-style
pops um and so i bought them out so i'm
sorry to any any
little kid that was going in that day
for that reason
um and these were like multi it was
multi-multi-flavored
like well there's watermelon cherry
there's like a was there like a lemon or
something like that
and ended up just using them all i was
going to use try to use all the
i wanted to use more cherry get a color
kind of like this
and so i kind of i was afraid i wouldn't
have enough
because they were what 12 ounce boxes or
something and so it's in it's hard to
get every last
drip out of some of those um and so i
ended up getting those like kool-aid
burst
things too just to kind of dose in for
some color and honestly i think probably
that
that cherry flavor is kind of the same
it's probably from the same the
the same vat yeah so it was about
15 percent of the beer which is
not not crazy for something like that
and
in both cases though it's amazing how
much sweetness there is when you're
diluting it down that far
i don't know about you like i don't
drink a lot of soda i don't drink a lot
of uh
Kool-aid or Hi-C anymore and it's it's
i guess i've gotten more sensitive to
like simple sugars to glucose
and sucrose because those are so rarely
in beer
but it definitely kind of is as
advertising this tastes like a
to me i can't not call it mr freezies
that's what it was when i was
growing up um my
my dad had like a old wine uh
one gallon wine jug that he would always
keep in his uh in his
their bedroom and it was like where he
put his change in every day okay
and so despite filling it it never got
full because of
me but every time i had a baseball game
and i would buy a jumbo mr freezie
afterwards and so when i'm drinking this
like
right where my mind goes yeah to me like
the the
cherry and the watermelon or sort of the
two that lead
um i was surprised because there wasn't
a lot of watermelon that went into it
but
that flavor is just so yeah artificial
watermelon whatever it is yeah
and the tartness of the of the base beer
kind of helps with it a little bit too
yeah
i mean sort of i mean i think acidity
always helps to sell fruit or fruity
flavors because
fruit is so acidic um
the color is nice honestly i'm surprised
the head retention is that good
both of these are only about 2.9 alcohol
because we started at 3.4
and diluted down yeah so people come in
today they can get half pours of both of
them
and then i guess we'll we'll be back
tomorrow the next day and
declare the winner and see whose car
gets uh washed or was that the uh
who gets the last six peanuts that you
saved from your right actually just
before we started scott got cocky and
didn't spend his whole ten dollars so he
was buying snacks for himself
why not
all right
watch the headlights
well we already got made fun of by
another local brewer so i'm trying to
get him to
take on the winner yeah vending machine
snacks only or something
i'm not sure we're allowed to go to a
vending machine place
