Barney's Back Strong Berry Wheat Beer

In the summer of 2014, Good Neighbor's first all grain brew was Barney's Dead. It was an experiment lead by Brett Meador wanting to make a beer with the mulberries that he personally picked from trees at his house. In today's post we are talking about the Lazareth of the Barney series -- Barney's Back! The second edition of the Barney series still consists of handpicked mulberries. They were picked in the late summer of 2014 by Neal and Brett. The Raspberries and Blueberries were purchased on brew day from local the grocer. Maybe someday we'll grow these and handpick them too. 

Compliments to Jenna taking some awesome pictures with her 35mm lens: http://jennagarberphotography.pass.us/goodneighbor_barneysback/

Grain

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5 lbs Wheat Malt

8 lbs 2 Row Morris Otter Pale Malt

2 lbs Munich Malt

.25 lbs Black Patent Malt

10 cups (4 lb) (our mash efficiency was terrible so sugar was added)

Fruit

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7 lbs mulberries (1 - one gallon bag)

14 oz Canned Raspberries

2 Pints Blueberries

Hops

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.5 oz Citra (60 min)

.5 oz Citra (30 min)

.5 oz some other 8% acid hop (30 min)

.5 oz Cascade (15 min)

.5 oz some other 8% acid hop (5)

Yeast
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2 packs of dry wheat beer yeast

Mash Schedule
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3.85 gallons of water needed for mash. Target temperature was 152°F to achieve a dryer flavor. We achieved mash temperature ranging between 148°F-152°F. 5+ gallons of water for sparge at 170°F.

Notes

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45 IBU calculated approximately.

Brew Day - 2/14/2015

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Preboil wort: 1.042 SG

We were/are not happy with the grain mill from roots - they were under milled. We heavily adjusted the gravity reading by adding sugar -- we added 4lbs of white sugar to the boil to boost gravity. Gravity reading was 1.095 after the wort was chilled.

Began primary fermentation at mid 50°F in the basement (carboy was off of the ground about 2 feet to avoid getting too cold from the concrete floor). After 2 days in the basement, I brought it upstairs to finish out in the low-to-mid 60°F range.

Secondary Fermentation Start - 2/20/2015

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Moved beer from the carboy to a bucket, added all of the berry juice (76.5 oz) to the beer in the bucket. After mixing the berries into the beer, I moved it back to the clean carboy because I wanted to see the color and take some good pictures!

Berry juice: 1.062 SG (76.5oz)

Beer before adding berries: 1.030 SG

Beer after adding berries: 1.034 SG

Assuming we started at 5.5 gallons of wort, after adding the berries we would be looking at a calculated OG of 1.092 SG since the beer was 1.095 by itself and considering the 1.030 SG of the berry juice.

Bottling Day - 3/5/2014

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Volume: 5.5 Gallons

Final Gravity: 1.008 SG

That’s all folks, 11% ABV before bottle conditioning

Before bottling it tasted like a wine, nice maroon/purple color. Not too bad, actually pretty palatable even young and uncarbonated. Not very much hop profile coming though at this tasting. Bottle conditioned with 1/2 cup of sugar.

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Harvesting Yeast from Primary Fermentation

The yeast here was harvested from the primary fermentation of Barney's Back. Its noteworthy to mention that there were 2 packs of dry wheat beer yeast pitched initially into the carboy to start primary fermentation. The primary was only 6 days in duration, before moving it to a secondary and adding berries. Primary was cut short just to ensure there were still plenty of yeast in suspension to take care of the sugars that the berries added. The yeast was still very active at this point. Although, this lead to a bit of a mess when harvesting because there were still sugars to cause some havoc in the mason jars that I used as harbors for the harvest.


To start, I siphoned the beer from the primary to a 6 gallon bucket (this is the bucket that I used to add the berries). I avoided siphoning all of the trub/sediment from the bottom of the carboy. A few days prior to this I had sterilized a few quarts of water by boiling over the stove. This water I stored in the fridge sterile mason jars. This was really helpful as the water was already cool and nearly ready to go - but not entirely ready to go - I wanted to warm the water up to room temperature. I warmed the sterile water jars up with an 80°F water submersion in a medium sized bowl. 


Once the water was room temperature, and the carboy was siphoned, I dumped a pint of water into the carboy. Then while shaking the carboy, I used the water to loosen the trub/sediment. As it loosened, I poured it into an empty sterile mason jar. I then added a little more water to the carboy, shaking and then dumping the loosened slurry into the mason jar. I was able to fill up two pint sized mason jars with yeast slurry. I then capped the two pints and let them sit over night in the refrigerator. 

After about 24 hours of sitting in an undisturbed environment, the trub and yeast will settle below the water. These layers will be distinct in the jar -- water at the top, yeast in the middle, then trub at the bottom. The yeast is the white layer.

Basically, that is the yeast cake which is ready to pitch into the next batch. 

Before pitching into the next batch, I washed the yeast about 4 times, and made a yeast starter with this yeast cake. 

Washing the yeast will clarify the yeast from debris and dirt. I did this probably 3 or 4 times before making the yeast starter. Washing the yeast is simply explained as this: 
1. Let settle for 24 hours
2. Dump the top layer of water out of the jar
3. Add clean, sterile water back into the jar
4. Shake up the jar so that the trub, yeast and water are mixed again
5. Let settle for 24 hours.
6. Repeat steps as many times as necessary. 

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