It's been raining on and off since yesterday; properly poured it down during the night, so there's not many things I can do outside.
Did have a desnailing session though... it was great during the 2 weeks of sunny weather, had almost no snails at all but as soon as the rain came back so did they, in force actually.
So... what better things to do inside than brew a beer? I always wanted to do a sour beer but I don't really have the patience to do it properly so I'm going to cheat a little.
I know from one of my friends brews that adding 1kg of passion fruit puree to a brew brings it almost to the edge of a sour beer so I think that doing that and adding a few drops of lactic acid should produce a really nice drink.
For some added citrus flavours I made a tea out of some lemon balm from outside and added that.
The base I'm using is my usual wheat malt extract; it's really versatile and should work well with the passion fruit and take some extra souring pretty well as well.
For additional sugars I added wheat spray malt, this should give it a fuller mouth feel.
The passion fruit puree has about 220 grams of sugars; I think the yeast should be able to use those up as well so I've only used 500g of spray malt.
The starting gravity is 1030 which is what a Berliner Weisse would have anyway. Obviously I know that I'm not going to get a Berliner from this experiment but I do want a light beer so this gravity should do just fine.
The puree gave it a really nice colour, we'll see how it will turn out!
And that was it... I've just pitched the yeast and moved it into my fermentation chamber... or under the stairs cupboard :D
Oh ... I need some name suggestions... The working name for now is 'My passion soured'; for a little UK political pun I'm thinking of 'May soured my passion' . Any preferences, any better ideas? Puns do get extra points :D
Cheers!