Brew Day: Peeterman Wit

Yeast starter a few days after creating it.

Yesterday I brewed up a wit beer with my buddy from work.  The thing was that this wasnt any normal wit.  We decided to make our creation of the old Peeterman style of beer. 

It started when my friend texted me and said that he found his old sour starter.  They started to dump it out figuring it was bad because it was 5 years old!  As they started to dump the starter down the drain they smelled how great it was and decided to save the rest. I came in and said I would take the starter and try to wake the yeast back up.

My plan was pretty simple - take a good portion of the sour starter and mix it a very small amount of fresh Belgian yeast (White Labs 550).  About two days after making the starter I saw activity that it was fermenting something so I let it go and then stepped it up to a larger starter in prep for the brew day.  Each day the starter smelled different.  One day it would smell rancid and then the next it would be this wonderful Rodenbach smelling wort.  After stepping up to the larger size it started to smell like a slightly sour saison.  There were no real warning signs after a few days so we decided to go for it.


We couldn't figure out what type of beer to make.  I already have a sour red, stout and lambic going and didn't want to duplicate efforts.  We were looking for something unique to go with our new unique batch of yeast.

I recently saw the New Orleans episode of Brew Dogs where the brewed a beer they called a Peeterman.  The explanation was that the beer would be a dark soured wit.  Sounded awesome.  Only problem was the episode said the recipe was 50-50 mix of pilsner and wheat.  Where was the dark color coming from?

So naturally the next step was to search the internet.  I couldn't find too much on the internet other than Peeterman was one of the three original "white beers" of Belgium and that all three hada varying degree of sourness from the lactic acid that would of infected beer before modern sanitation practices.  I wanted to learn more so  I found that a brief section of the book "Brewing with Wheat" had some information.  There was no recipe but enough for me to determine that we should just brew a wit and add our soured WLP550 batch of yeast and see what we get.

The book did provide some insight into a modern day old-school wit.  That beer is Jolly Pumpkin Calabaza Blanca.  A funky and slightly tart wit.  We added the dregs of one of these beers to our final concoction of yeast for one last punch of funk.

Brew day went smooth and our blend of yeast are rapidly chewing through the sugars.  They were active within 12 hours which is pretty fast based on how most of my beers go.  We plan to drink it fresh because the book stated that these beers were typical consumed within two weeks before they went too far over to the sour side.

Depending on what flavors we get from the primary we may decide to add a bit more orange or coriander to freshen up the flavor while its in the secondary.  We will for sure be adding a bit of oak to replicate the old style of fermenting everything in barrels.  Updates will be posted as they happen.