Wheat wine

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full malty

Wheat wine

Post by full malty » Sat Apr 15, 2006 9:52 pm

I'm having a little difficulty understanding recipes for "wheat wine".
Most of the recipes don't say whether the wheat is malted or not, so I
have assumed the wheat is not malted.

How can the wheat contribute towards the wine, as the unmalted wheat
berry contains mainly starch ? Can a wine or beer yeast work on
unmalted wheat... how ?

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Jim
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Post by Jim » Sun Apr 16, 2006 9:08 am

Hmm, I wouldn't have thought so, FM. You would need some malted grain at least to supply the enzymes to convert the starch.

According to my 'First steps in Winemaking" by C J Berry, you add something called 'amylozyme' and let it steep for 10 days with all the ingredients. Maybe that stuff acts like amylase and converts the starch to sugar.

deadlydes

Post by deadlydes » Mon May 22, 2006 9:51 am

i wasnt too sure about this but i posted on another forum and got these replies

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Most of the wheat wines I see use the grain only for flavoring. The wines still call for 2-3lbs of sugar/gallon for the alcohol. You could always use malt to convert some of the starch in the grain to fermentable sugars and adjust accordingly.



As far as I can recall, wheat itself is difficult to malt, and more often then not, if conversion of the wheat is desired, its accomplished with the addition of malted barely or amylase enzymes.
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the wheat is usually unmalted, just dried-though lightly malted can be used---after soaking overnight then crushing it releases starches converted to sugars, as well as the grain flavour--it's particularly noticable in Jap Gin Wine, and Potato Wine---you must use Amalyse enzyme.
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BitterTed

Post by BitterTed » Fri Sep 08, 2006 12:29 am

The only wheat wine Ive had is wheat beer made at barleywine strength, which is what I assumed you were asking about . There are a few brewers here that make wheatwine (barleywine type) that is quite good. They use malted wheat, I'm sure a bit of barley is in it too.
Interesting stuff posted by deadlydes!!

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