Wheat beer gone sour

[strick88]

Need some help on why this wheat may have gone sour. It was brewed mid Aug opened a bottle today notice a sour smell may a bit like ester. Taste was sour nothing like a wheat as I wanted. Mashed at 155 for 60 mins, biab system. Fermented for 5 days in primary then 10 days in secondary with fresh watermelon frozen in vodka.

 

[RPh_Guy]

Is this your first time using this recipe?

Some things I notice:
Hefeweizen yeast can produce a tartness...
Especially when you target a low mash pH like 5.2, which it appears you did. Also, sometimes the amount of acid needed to reach that pH in a pale grist can be detected as sourness by some of us, depending on the water's alkalinity.

I'd be a little surprised if it is noticably contaminated, given the amount of hops you used. However, neither freezing fruit nor soaking it in vodka kills the wild microbes, so you almost certainly added some to your beer. It's possible that some bacteria were indeed hop-tolerant.
Can you test the pH of the beer after degassing a sample?

Welcome to HBT

 

[mashpaddled]

Your problem could involve several issues.

How warm did you ferment it? Hefe strains can go a little warm but tend to produce less pleasant flavors at hotter temperatures.

The watermelon could have fermented out to a weird amorphous melon flavor.

The combination of low mash ph plus hefe yeast plus the water content of the watermelon could have created a thin, acidic beer.

We cannot rule out infection.


As an aside--why so much crystal malt? That is way, way too much crystal malt for most purposes.

 

[bracconiere]

That is way, way too much crystal malt for most purposes.

it's only 10L..Beersmith predicts a pretty light beer with it....

and, did you use the rind of watermelon also? did you taste the watermelon before adding to make sure it was ripe?

 

[kh54s10]

The above, and the mash temperature was way high, IMO. I would have gone about 150.

5 days in primary is pretty short and I would skip a secondary entirely, if you could fit the fruit in your primary vessel.