In the busy past months the fated pickle beer never got bottled. It has been sitting in the fermentation chamber until tonight. The review of pickle beer:

Appearance: A fairly clear, tan straw color.

Smell: It smells great! Bready with a funky sour overtone. Very impressed with the smell for an experimental batch like this.

Taste: Unfortunately WAY too salty. 3 teaspoons of salt was just too much and overpowers anything else in the beer. Bad miscalculation for such a small batch when it smelled so good. None of the dill comes through, nor the pepper. Hard to identify anything else behind the salt, so its hard to judge an amount or complexity to the sour portion of the beer.

Mouthfeel: It dries your mouth out from all the salt but it has a slightly slick feeling to it.

Overall: An utter failure and I will dump the rest of it. Honestly I think the kombucha culture starter for a day before adding in vermont ale yeast to finish fermentation has a lot of potential for a quick light sour beer. If I were to redo the beer, I'd probably cut the salt back to maybe half a teaspoon and add a whole package or more of dill.

Being the first of the month I wanted to get some beers going. I had wanted to make a Gose for a long time now, even more after trying Sam Adam's 26.2. I have also been threatening Lisa for years about making a pickle beer. Lisa absolutely hates pickles, she likes cucumbers and fermented things, but not pickles.

So for April Fools day, I have brewed a pickle beer!

A traditional Gose is usually barley based, spiced with salt and coriander, and finished by lacto fermentation. This pickle beer is slightly different with a bit of salt, peppercorns, and dill. I made a "starter" with the cultures from 3 different kombucha bottles. I'm going to let this do its thing for a day or two, then sprinkle in a little CBC-1 bottling yeast to help finish it out.

I was in the middle of the boil when Lisa walked in the door- perfect timing. She yelled "divorce before marriage!" as it has become tradition when discussing pickle beer. After a small complaint about me actually making a pickle beer, I said she'll feel better about it after she tries a pickle beer. "Oh that's an old wives' tale!" she responded.

"No, its a New Husbands' tale"

Onto the pictures and recipe: