WeldWerks brews winner based on a dessert favorite

By Steve Graham

Neil Fisher likes pouring dessert into a pint glass. The head brewer at WeldWerks Brewing has crafted beers inspired by German chocolate cake, blood orange creamsicles and French Toast. However, one of his most popular sweets-inspired creations is, perhaps surprisingly, a kettle-soured Key Lime Pie Berliner.

Like a more traditional Berliner Weisse, it’s cloudy, white, sour and low in both alcohol and bitterness, making it extremely drinkable. Hints of vanilla and graham cracker sweetness offset a tart lime kick.

“We wanted to keep it really approachable,” Fisher said. “We just use enough hops to keep some stability and enough bitterness to balance the sweetness. We get a lot of the pithy bitterness from the juice extraction.”

Fisher said the reaction has been strong and positive in both the WeldWerks taproom and at beer festivals around the region.

For the latest batch of the sour wheat beer, WeldWerks ordered about 600 pounds of key limes, juicing 20 pounds of lime into each barrel of beer at the end of fermentation.

He adds real vanilla bean, which he said is getting harder to find. Lactose is added during the boil, which is unusual for a kettle sour, but Fisher said it adds nice flavor and body.

“With all that together, you have almost that custard-like filling flavor,” he said.

The first couple of batches included actual graham crackers, but Fisher found that it wasn’t adding any flavor, so he started experimenting with his malt blend.

“We are going to rely on the malt build to give us that graham cracker character,” he said.

The Berliner was a bigger hit than he expected. He made it as a one-time creation, but said it could become a year-round staple if he finds a less labor-intensive brewing method, perhaps by finding a key lime puree or concentrate that matches the flavor of real, fresh limes.

Fisher had not brewed commercially before opening WeldWerks.

However, he had gotten serious about home brewing with his eventual business partner, Colin Jones. They launched an informal homebrew club and traveled to brewery tours and festivals, and even placed a wager.

“We had a long-running bet that if I won awards, we would start a brewery,” Fisher said.

Sure enough, his barrel-aged home brew won some national contests, so they launched WeldWerks in downtown Greeley.

Steve Graham is a Fort Collins writer who enjoys the outdoors and great beers.