Berliner Weisse

If you find kettle-acidification to be intimidating, this Berliner weisse is a great way to start learning the process and thus expand your repertoire as a brewer.

Tart, light, and utterly quenching, a great Berliner weisse is the perfect summertime beer, and it can win the hearts and minds of stone-hearted skeptics. Best of all, it doesn’t need to be difficult to brew.

Josh Weikert prowled his local produce aisle following a simple principle: Buy what looks best, and go with the freshest fruit you can get. That led him to guava and passion fruit, a dynamic for this Brazilian-inspired tart fruit beer.

Brazil’s take on tart fruit beer—the Catharina sour—has its own name and moves, but brewers anywhere can follow the steps.

From fresh catch to fridge favorite, this bright and flavorful warm-weather dish is a perfect foil for the refreshingly tart beer—your choice—with which it’s made.

Is the future of Berliner weisse to be found in the past? These five mixed-fermentation versions offer a glimpse of what was and what remains possible.

This is a homebrew-scale recipe for Schell’s base Berliner weisse recipe, a traditionally brewed, mixed-culture take on the style.

The traditional white beer from Berlin has had many guises over the centuries, from simpler Lacto sours to fruit-packed smoothies, via enigmatic, mixed-fermentation constructions more closely aligned with its history.

At Minnesota’s August Schell Brewing, Jace Marti brews authentic, mixed-fermentation, Berliner-style weissbier. Here is some context on the style and details on Schell’s methods, including lots on Brett and those beautiful cypress tanks.

This recipe is a great introduction to kettle sours. A mild, refreshing mint addition complements the fruit and acidity.

In further exploring how to squeeze the most character out of extract brewing, Jester Goldman turns his attention to kettle sours.

For Charlotte, North Carolina's Resident Culture, taste and quality are sacrosanct. No ingredient or process is sacred in the quest to improve.

As a root of civilization and the soft heart of some of the world’s most drinkable beers, wheat deserves more love.

Ulrike Genz at Schneeeule makes a variety of beers, but this is the closest thing they have to a flagship and her purest expression of what she believes a traditional Berliner weisse ought to be.

No simple kettle sours, these. In Berlin, Schneeeule is waging a battle to revive a more traditional mixed-fermentation Berliner weisse.

Rowley Farmhouse Ales of Santa Fe, New Mexico, is carving out a sour and funky niche in the Southwestern desert.

In this clip from our full video course on kettle-souring, Resident Culture's Chris Tropeano talks about pre-boiling and de-aerating wort, creating an ideal environment for lactic bacteria.

In this clip from our full video course on kettle-souring, Resident Culture's Chris Tropeano discusses pulling lactic bacteria from the bottom of the kettle for re-pitching in future beers.

In this 54-minute video, Chris Tropeano of Resident Culture Brewing goes in-depth on brewing kettle-soured beers with balance and complexity.

The current popularity of Berliner weisse has brought an endless supply of flavors to the low-ABV, tart wheat ale. This means woodruff syrup has been left behind. We need to keep the sweet green liquid part of our beer tradition, argues our senior editor.