I saw these Mangrove Jack’s Berliner Style Sour Ale kits on the BrewUK website, and since I’ve had mixed luck with my own attempts at souring, I thought it worth a go.
I made the kit to the instructions, so that was using the 1.8kg pouch, adding 600g DME, making it up to 23 litres, and fermenting with the supplied M20 Bavarian Wheat Beer Yeast packet. When I bought it BrewUK were running a promotion that included a pack of the Mangrove Jack’s LME, but since that was 1.2kg and I only needed 600g, I went with the DME that I had in my stocks.
The fermentation took off very quickly, and was done within the week, so I kegged it into 2 corneys (since it was 23 litres that was a bit more than 1 corney’s worth, and I had two empty at the time, so it seemed easiest). The smaller of the corneys I then bottled with my shiny new Blichmann Beer Gun.
I was really impressed with this kit. The beer is a perfectly clear, pale, gold. Typical wheat beer aromas, bananas and the like, which are also present when tasted. The sourness isn’t mouth-puckering, but it’s more than enough to let you know you’re drinking a sour beer. It’s a really refreshing and tasty beer.
So much so, in fact, I bought another two of them. It’s described as being a “limited edition”, so I grabbed a couple, but I really hope they keep making them.
The M20 yeast did make me expect it, but I was kind of surprised by the overtly wheat beer flavours of this kit, I guess I was expecting something more like the Berliner-Weisse-styled beers I’ve had from the likes of Siren’s Calypso, where I don’t remember any bananas at all! The ones I made myself I also used a neutral yeast (as I was planning to dry-hop and wanted those flavours to come through).
So, for my second time around I’m not using the kit yeast. In fact, I’ve added it straight on top of the yeast cake left from having just kegged the Gamma Ray. I’m making it to 20 litres (i.e. a corney), so after a bit of fiddling with BeerSmith worked out that I wanted 250g DME to get the same OG, which has turned out to be 1.030.
I’m also going to dry hop it when fermentation has finished, though I’m not sure with what. I have some Galaxy, Amarillo, Citra, and Cascades (among plenty of others!), so I’ll decide next week whether to go for a single hop, or a bit of a blend.
