The tartness of his face sours ripe grapes.

Instead of weeping when a tragedy 
occurs in a songbird’s life, it sings 
away its grief. I believe we could 
well follow the pattern of our 
feathered friends.
–Shakespeare

I’m quoting Shakespearean tragedies – clearly something has gone wrong. If the melancholy intro didn’t give that away, the picture to the right should – that’s a full keg of beer going down the drain. Specifically my Easy as 1-2-3-4: a Rye Berliner Weiss…

…clearly it wasn’t as easy as I intended. So where did things go wrong?

The short answer is “I don’t know”, simply because I threw so many new things into this batch that its not possible to point the finger at a likely culprit. I’m 99% sure the problem was the ratio’s of the yeast I threw in. Two of the three yeasts – both brett – were reputed to have a lemony character, and combined were half the yeast I pitched. Their lemony character was present in this beer – in spades. The lemon was so intense it was “chemical” in character; more in-place in a bottle of furniture polish than a beer. In addition there was a strong acetaldehyde/nail polish note – perhaps due to the use of a pure lacto culture, or perhaps again due to the yeast used. Moreover, the yeast wouldn’t settle (even after a cold-crash), leaving the beer hazy and with a strong yeast character.

I shouldn’t complain too much – this is the first dumper in over 7 years…& that ain’t bad.