After the rapturous response I had at LAB for my Dunkel Hefeweizen (not... it seemed to have oxidised from too long in the secondary
) I thought "how dark could I get a wheat beer?"2kg Wheat malt
1kg Vienna malt
500g crystal wheat malt
200g chocolate malt
52g roasted wheat malt
Mash schedule:
½ hour @ 50 ̊C
1 hour @ 66 ÌŠC
Boiled 1 hour with 36g 2007 home-grown Hallertau hops and 1 lidful of Irish Moss.
Boiled further 15 minutes with 10g 2007 home-grown Hallertau hops while heating quadruple immersion chiller to sanitise.
Force-cooled to 23.8 ÌŠC from 95 ÌŠC in about 11 minutes.
Pitched Danstar Munich German Wheat Beer yeast slurry from when I racked my Dunkel Hefeweizen on the 31st of October. It had been sitting in a 2l demijohn under clingfilm in my 8 degree beer fridge. I did the acid wash using more-or-less the Ant Hayes method, then gave it half a litre of canned wort to get going with while I finished the boil and chilling. 21 litres including the starter.
OG 1048 @ 20 ÌŠC = 1048.8 @ 15.5 ÌŠC
Grain bill:
CU mashing, with revamped U-tube and the elephant's coke spoon:
Mashing with the HERMS, showing the pipework horizontal rather than going down to the floor and up again, also new-ish shiny HLT (EDIT: separate post now on line):
The heat exchanger in its little jacket:
The slightly-revamped pump (air bleed valve idea stolen from adm - thanks! Also splash shield made from sheet ali and and less-wobbly handle):
Preheating the sparging tee on top of the shiny HLT:
Sparging (into my second boiler so I could get it going without the wait to go back up from post-sparge 50 ÌŠC to boiling):
The boil (there is a hop bag in there somewhere):
Chilling with the quad immersion chiller while recirculating wort:
Racked it on the 17th of January, Quite sweet and thick, slight Marmite note, some hop there.
Bottled on the 1st of February. PG 1017.2 @ 15.5 ÌŠC so 4.07% ABV at this point using HMRC fudge factor of 0.129. Less Marmitey than previous sampling.
I'm not sure if I get the Marmite vibe from lots of dark malt or from yeast autolysis - or both. Test further when it's had a month in bottle.