Our brew club is focusing on fruit beers for the April meeting, so I wanted to have something ready to go. Thumbing through the recently published Brew Your Own book, I saw a tasty-looking recipe for a clone of Funkwerks Raspberry Provincial.

One interesting thing about the BYO recipe is that it uses acidulated malt rather than kettle souring to achieve the sourness. I vacillated on which approach I would take, but in the end went for acidulated malt for simplicity.

I modified the recipe slightly for the hop bill, and also scaled it down from 5 gallons to 3 gallons. I figured I didn’t really want 5 gallons of a raspberry beer, tasty though it might be. I also will be using a home-made puree from frozen raspberries, rather than canned raspberry puree. The cans are huge, more than twice the volume I need for this recipe, and a bit expensive, so it didn’t make sense to waste the money buying a whole ton of extra raspberry. Per recommendations on the fruit puree company website, I upped the quantity of fruit by 12 percent a bit to account for all of the stuff that doesn’t make it into a typical puree can (seeds, etc.). The final modification was to go with a full-volume mash, to save a bit of time.

Raspberry Belgian

• 2.5 lb. floor-malted Bohemian pilsner malt (Weyermann)
• 1.25 lb. white wheat malt (Great Western Malting Co.)
• 0.75 lb. acidulated malt (Weyermann), added to last 20 minutes of mash
• 0.3 lb. flaked oats
• 0.3 lb. flaked wheat
• 0.25 lb. Carapils malt
• 0.16 lb. rice hulls
• 0.12 oz. Warrior hops (15.8% alpha), 60 minute boil
• 0.20 oz. Willamette hops (5.1% alpha), 15 minute boil
• 1 pkg. Belgian Wit Ale yeast (WLP400, White Labs), prepared in 0.5L starter
• 17 oz. raspberry puree, added after 4 days of fermentation

Target Parameters

• 155° mash, 60 minutes
• 1.043 o.g., 1.011 f.g., 4.1% abv, 15 IBU, 3 SRM, 3 gallons into the fermenter

Procedure

• I added 5.25 gallons of water at 170°, and let it cool down until it hit a temperature of 159.5°. Then, I mashed in with my grains (except for the acidulated malt) and hit a temperature of 155.4°.
• After 40 minutes, the mash temperature was down to 150.4°. At this piont, I added the acidulated malt.
• At the end of the 60 minute mash, the temperature was down to 148.7°. I vorlaufed and collected 4.2 gallons of wort with a gravity of 1.030. This equated to 64% efficiency. That is a fair bit below my normal efficiency in the upper 70s, but I figure that was probably due to the full volume mash, no sparge technique, as well as the high number of adjuncts.
• I added hops per the schedule, over the course of a 60 minute boil.
• After 60 minutes, I chilled to 70°, transferred to the fermenter while aerating, and pitched the yeast.
• Starting gravity was 1.039, a bit below target. I think I’m okay with that, given how new this brew is to my experience. I find it interesting that, at least in a casual tasting, the flavor isn’t that prominently sour or tart. I wonder how that will come through in the finished beer?
• I brewed this on 10 March 2017, and will be fermenting at 71°. On March 14, I will add the raspberry puree.