Adrian Febre

The Premise:

The theme of the advent calendar this year was “beers inspired by x,” and immediately Dogfish Head’s excellent Festina Peche came to mind. It was something like the third craft beer I ever had, at an UES craft beer bar in NYC (that’s still there!), and it was a shocking revelation of just how incredibly strange beer could be.

Serving notes:

Heads up, this is bottle conditioned, so there’s yeast in the bottle! Beyond that, no idea what optimal temp is - probably mid-40s?

Accompanying song:

Brujeria by El Gran Combo De Puerto Rico - you must watch this vid first/at some point while drinking

The Recipe & Process:

• The beer was quite simple, being brewed with equal parts Admiral Pils & probably Weyermann Malted Wheat, and a pinch of various water chem salts

• Mashed at 150f, racked to my PET rum fermenter, and kettle soured with some very old lacto plantarum

  • Forgot the rice hulls, so ever with a BrewZilla (raised basket), the sparge took an eternity (and this was BIAB - no added water)

• I wasn’t able to keep the fermenter hot enough, so it kettle soured around 75f-80f for a week or so, which was somewhat sub-optimal; the beer’s a bit tarter and drier than intended, possibly in part due to that

• I then boiled it w/ a touch of Saaz for…30 min? Something like that; chilled it; and racked it to a keg, ferm’ing around 68f-70f

• Two weeks or so in, I added four 14 oz pouches (to 3 gal of beer) of Goya’s oddly superb Guava puree, and left that in the keg (risky! Clog risk!) for like 10ish days

  • You can get this, and a zoo of various frozen purees of hard-to-get fruits at Vallarta (don’t forget a Conch on your way out!)

• The original intention was to use peaches, and I did buy, like, 4.5 lb of frozen California peaches, but the home juicer I used to try and get juice out of those puppies was wildly inefficient, so I faced a choice: rack the Berliner into a new fermenter, and either toss in thawed peaches (and risk infection, if a slight risk), or somehow heat-sterilize those whole peaches and do the same, or just go with the bangin’ Guava puree I’d used before and make a quite likely better beer, if not the one I’d intended, so that’s what I did

  • I kept the second bag of peaches, and I intend to do a one gallon batch of true Peach Berliner Weisse in the near future - if it doesn’t suck, I’ll bring it to a meeting

• I then bottled it with my absolute favorite means - via a crude beer gun directly into sani’d bottles

  • Note: using a small square of parchment paper and a jeweler’s scale made dosing the priming sugar insanely easy. I dosed everything to within 3% of the target (~0.05g tolerance, 1.47 g/bottle for an estimated 2.0 volumes if memory serves)

• Et voila! FG was, via refractometer, 1.023, so that calcs out to an ABV (pre-Guava) of about 3.0%

  • (OG was 1.037 or so, 1.042 target but bang on 3 gal - we’ll take it)