Vignette 36: Jace Marti, Schell's Brewery
Jace Marti is one member of the sixth generation of family owners of the August Schell Brewing Company in New Ulm, Minnesota. A decade ago, he went to study brewing at the VLB school in Berlin, where he learned all he could about making traditional Berliner weisse. Rehabbing old cypress wood tanks at the brewery, he initiated a program to revive the style and now Schell's makes some of the most authentic versions available.
Traditional Berliner weisse, made using mixed fermentation—including aging on wild yeast—went extinct just after the new century dawned. Fortunately, knowledge of it didn’t. The brewer at the last brewery making it, Schultheiss, is still alive, and fans of the style teach at VLB, passing along their wisdom. Students like Alan Taylor, Ulrike Genz, and Jace all delved deeply into the style with the help of the school and are on the vanguard reviving it.
In today’s vignette, Jace describes one of the processes used at Schultheiss passed along to him by that last brewer, Wolfram Lange. Schell’s had been making Berliner weisse for years, but they recently began using this old practice and may be the only brewery doing so.
“We’ve adapted their process, which involves adding back old beer. The way they did it is they would do a mixed culture primary, they pitched fresh cultures. Nobody at the VLB knows what it was—or if they do they don’t tell. They are kind of secretive about that stuff.
“I got my hands on a bunch of old bottles and we cultured all the Bretts and Lactos out of those bottles and used them for that method. We prop those up and pitch a mixed culture—and they had pitching rates, which was nice. It was this tiny little pitch. But then into the fermenter they would also add back 10-15% of aged, finished beer. So you had beer that was already mature: that would help lower the pH, but it would also help bring some of that residual character into the new batch. You had a mix of old cultures and new cultures going through primary, and then they would move it to secondary and when they would bottle it, they would use krausen from freshly fermented beer that was again pitched with new and old. So they were adding old beer back twice.”
COVER PHOTO: THE NEXT PINT