Regardless of the Reinheitsgebot in Germany, there are plenty of different beer styles. We’ve explored Helles, Wheat beer and Dark Ales, but one of the beer that got forgotten over the years is definitely the Gose. I must admit that I haven’t heard of the Gose until I did some research on sour beers. One of the better known german sours is the Berliner Weisse. Both Gose and Weisse lost popularity over the last 100 years but it seems like craft brewers rediscovered the style. So we wanted to give it a shot and try to replicate a Gose. This is how it went:

First, let’s do some research. Wikipedia gives us some first hints:

Gose is a warm fermented beer that originated in Goslar, Germany. It is usually brewed with at least 50% of the grain bill being malted wheat. source Wikipedia

Ok, so the Gose is a sour beer with a strong acidity and herbal notes which makes it a perfect summer beer.

After googling and browsing some forums, we found this old recipe in “Grundsätze der Bierbrauerei nach den neuesten technisch-chemischen Entdeckungen” by Christian Heinrich Schmidt from 1853 (pages 447-448). You can read it here: https://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2010/07/gose-recipe.html

The problem is, that sour beers are fermented in a special way. Half of the batch gets fermented by yeast, classical for beer brewing, right? The other half is fermented by lactobacillus bacteria. This can be nasty, because it’s really hard to get rid of this bacteria in your fermenter and we didn’t want to spoil our fermenter with bacteria. So we decided to cheat and skip this step. Instead, we’ve added the lactic acid after the fermentation.

Ingredients

10L Mash

8L Sparge

We used Berlin tap water which is considered medium hard to hard (14 °dH).

Fermentables

• 900g Pilsner Malt
• 1kg Wheat Malt
• 350g Sour Malt

Hops / flavoring

Total boiling time is 90 minutes from hot break.

Here are the hop and spice additions. We decided to add salt and coriander for the herbal flavour 10 minutes before the end of boiling. Also, untypically, we added additional hops for more bitterness.

Brewing

We decided to go with a single temperature infusion at 65°C. This should result in a rather dry beer.

Fermentation

Salafe S-05 (dry).

Fermentation takes about 10 - 12 days at 18°C. Eventual second fermentation to clear the beer. (To be decided)

Since we are too lazy to ferment with lactobacillus bacteria, we will add lactic acid before bottling. Next time, we will try it with an actual Lactic acid fermentation.

Comments

First measurement revealed 1,035 gravity just before the hot break.

OG: 1,045 - Note: OG for Gose should be between 1,035 and 1,056

Brewer’s tip

Let it sit in the bottle for at least 8 weeks before drinking. It’s gonna be worth the extra waiting time!

Drink with mates and nerds!