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Couldn’t  Be Easier “Framboise”

5 gallons; O.G. = 1.048

Ingredients:

• 3.3 lbs. Munton & Fison Extra Light Malt Extract
• 2.2 lbs. Morgan Master Blend — wheat (extract)
• 1 lb. Corn sugar (No, really!)
• 1 oz. Mt. Hood hop pellets
• 4 oz. Raspberry “Natural Fruit Flavor”
• Red Star Ale yeast

Step-by-step:

This recipe calls for no grains, which is one of the things that makes it so simple. The Master Blend is a new liquid extract product from an Australian firm and is a blend of wheat and barley malt. The sugar was added to bring up the starting gravity a bit and to keep the beer very light and refreshing at the same time. The malts and sugar are boiled together in 2.5 gallons of water for 90 minutes, with the hops added after the first 15 minutes. At the end of the boil, the concentrated wort was added to 2.5 gallons of pre-boiled and cooled water.

I like to use an open fermenter, and the new, improved Red Star ale yeast is a good, clean yeast—not a lot of character, but it’s simple to use. One of the advantages to an open fermenter is that I can sanitize a stainless steel kitchen whip and beat a lot of oxygen into the wort before pitching the yeast. Shazam! This beer finished out in about five days.

At bottling time I added 3/4 cup corn sugar to enough water to dissolve it, boiled that syrup for 15 minutes, and added it to the beer when I racked into my bottling carboy. I also added the raspberry fruit flavor. This particular essence came from HopTech, but other stores carry them as well.

If you want to make this beer a little more interesting, here are some possibilities:

Use a more flavorful yeast.  Something like W3068, Wyeast’s Weihenstephan weizenbier yeast would add a lot of interesting flavors, and I think the vanilla note that the yeast produces would be particularly nice with the raspberries.

Or add something really wild, like a Brettanomyces culture. Brettano-myces are a “wild” yeast, once common in British ales and very important factors in Belgium’s distinctive lambic beers.  Be prepared, however, to wait months for the Brettano-myces to work through the beer and add its distinctive character.