Three major gold medals in the past four years—two at the Great American Beer Festival and one at the World Beer Cup—mark a recent run of success for Goggle Fogger, the German-style weissbier that’s been in the Fat Head’s lineup since the brewery opened in 2009. However, inspiration for the beer goes back to the early 1990s.
“My first exposure to hefeweizen was back in ’93, at a beer festival at Stoudts Brewing,” says Matt Cole, Fat Head’s cofounder and brewmaster. That festival was where Cole first tried Baltimore Brewing’s example of the style. A few years later, he would go on to apprentice at Baltimore Brewing. “Their version really stood out, and I figured the reason it’s really special is because of the processes that they go through with open fermentation.”
Some of that influence also came from Cole’s travels to Bavaria. “As I traveled through Europe, I saw more and more breweries using open-top fermentation,” Cole says. “I thought the flavor was just spectacular.” The way he saw it, American breweries often were using the same high-quality German malts, they had access to the same yeast strains, and hops weren’t really a factor. It had to be the open fermentation. He was intrigued, and he was determined to produce a world-class hefeweizen.
Although Cole knew that open fermentation was important to the style, Fat Head’s fermented Goggle Fogger in closed tanks for almost a decade. It wasn’t until they opened a new production brewery in 2018 that Cole was able to include open fermentation. That change plus a few tweaks to the malt bill, in his view, are what took the beer from good to great—and the first of those three gold medals came in 2020.
“Open fermentation reduced some of the sulfur in the beer,” Cole says. “Open fermentation has the ability to off-gas and [create] ester formation. It’s just a big component of what makes [hefeweizen] so special.”
Photo: Courtesy Fat Head’s
Key Details
Other Bavarian weissbier breweries that have inspired Cole include Michael Plank, outside of Regensburg, and Müllerbräu in Pfaffenhofen, north of Munich. A few years before building Fat Head’s, Cole noticed that some of the weizens that he loved had a little color to them.
“It wasn’t just pale, you know?” he says. Diving in deeper, he learned that some breweries were using a bit of caramel wheat malt in their recipes. “It gives a bit of this nice creaminess,” he says, while also adding a little body and some color. Goggle Fogger also includes a bit of Munich malt for some bready sweetness.
Fat Head’s uses a traditional mash schedule for the style, designed to create a “relatively dry beer,” Cole says. It goes like this:
- They start with a ferulic-acid rest at 113°F (45°C) for 10 minutes.
- Protein rest at 122°F (50°C) for 15 minutes.
- Beta rest at 144°F (62°C) for 35 minutes.
- They touch 154°F (68°C) for just five minutes, “literally to just break those chains up a little bit,” Cole says.
- Finally, mash out at 170°F (77°C).
Fat Head’s uses a blend of weissbier yeast, with Weihenstephaner’s strain as its core. (Commercially available versions of that strain include SafAle W-68, White Labs WLP300 Hefeweizen Ale, and Wyeast 3068 Weihenstephan Weizen.) Cole recommends blending different yeasts to create the complexity that works best for your specific brewing system and process.
The target for the water is about 1:1 chloride-to-sulfate. The Fat Head’s team adds a bit of calcium chloride to the boil for some extra softness or roundness to the flavor profile. (The water comes in from Lake Erie and is fairly balanced, Cole says, but with some temporary hardness in it via a higher level of calcium carbonate.) Hopping here is for balance; Fat Head’s uses Sterling.
One of the unusual things about the process at Fat Head’s is that the brewery uses a flotation tank for its lagers as well as the hefeweizen. Much more common in Central Europe than the United States, the flotation tank is a way to separate some trub from the wort once fermentation has begun.
At Fat Head’s, they knock out the first batch of Goggle Fogger at 62°F (17°C) into the float tank. “We float with sterile compressed air,” Cole says. After six hours, it goes to the open fermentor. Then the second batch of beer goes into the float tank, sans yeast, and after six hours it joins the first batch in the open fermentor. They set the temperature to 68°F (20°C) and allow it to free-rise.
The float tank, Cole says, “removes some of the sharper, harsher, bitter compounds from the trub. We’ve also found that the colder temperature associated with the free-rise gives us a little more dynamic phenolic profile. The brewery is also “grossly under-pitching,” he says, resulting in some yeast stress that helps build the ester and phenol flavors that so many drinkers appreciate.
Initially, the German installers tried to talk Fat Head’s out of using the flotation tank. “We [brewed] one batch without the float tank, and we didn’t like it as well,” Cole says. “It didn’t have the same dynamics as the beer that was made using the float tank.” So, the float tank stayed.
Fat Head’s also skims the kräusen from the open fermentor. They use a big ladle to help clean off some of the top layer. When the beer has dropped to about 3°P (or 1.012), they transfer the beer to a closed conical that’s been heavily purged with CO2. They package the final beer at about 2.75 volumes of CO2, a bit higher than most Fat Head’s beers.
They don’t filter or centrifuge Goggle Fogger. Over time, some of the yeast tends to fall out of suspension, Cole says, but he doesn’t necessarily recommend rousing the bottles, even for competitions. “I find that when we reintroduce yeast from the bottom, a lot of times it is just dead yeast, and we get some of these meaty autolyzed characteristics that I don’t particularly like,” he says. “You can maybe rouse a can a little bit, but I’m not pouring the stuff from the bottom. You know—stirred, but not shaken.”
Tried-and-True
Fat Head’s didn’t enter Goggle Fogger into competition until after its new production brewery came online in 2018. Obviously, the results since then have been impressive.
“It’s been on somewhat of a roll,” Cole says. “There’s really no secret. I think our process is very unique to us.” He says he hopes the information shared here can help others improve their own wheat beers.
Discussing the wider beer market, Cole says his expectation is that the strong will get stronger. “I think people are gravitating toward tried-and-true brands and experimenting a little bit less because they’re afraid of getting burned. I’m hoping that as long as we keep our quality up and keep it affordable, we’ll be around for another 50 years.”