Meine Weizen

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charliefarley
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Meine Weizen

Post by charliefarley » Sun Jun 19, 2011 9:13 pm

First brewday posting.

I seem to get through weizens pretty quick so I thought (at the last minute) that I'd try my first 10G batch.

Recipe:

5kg Wheat Malt
2.5kg Vienna Malt (uk)
2.5kg Marris Otter

50g Tettnang
18g Hallertau Mittlefruh

Hopefully half way to a dunkel more of a dark hefe really.

Also at the last minute I thought I'd have my first go at step infusion mashing.
Went for 42C for 20 mins, 55C for another 20mins then 68C for half an hour before draining off and batch sparging over two batches as my mash tun is only 30L.

A bit over optimistic with my new false bottom as I'd not done a wheat beer using it before - not a stuck mash exactly as it was always running slowly, but sooo slowly that it took almost three hours to drain, fill drain, fill and drain again!

All that time in the mash gave me much more sugars than I'd expected though as I was expecting the OG pre boil to be 1.042 but it was 1.053 giving 94% efficiency!? Way higher than I usually get.

Excuse the upside down photos - bloody iphones!

First infusion was pretty dry:
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Second infusion @55C
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Last one bringing it up to 68C - still very thick mash with 10kg grain in a 30L mash tun:
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I didn't bother recirculating the first runnings as it was only dribbling out. Couldn't boil straight away anyway as I had to go out for a bbq so I let it settle out and then decanted it off the milky stuff.
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Danger of overflowing!
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I'm pitching this into two fermenters, one I made a small 500ml starter of some schneider weisse yeast recovered from an dunkel weizen about a month ago and the other I'm just going to throw the yeast straight in without a starter.
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Since taking the photo I've chickened out and decided to add another bottle of saved yeast to the non starter beer - that amounts to about half the washed yeast cake from a 20L brew.

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6470zzy
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Re: Meine Weizen

Post by 6470zzy » Sun Jun 19, 2011 9:27 pm

Looks like you are going to have an active fermentation, at least that is my experience with Hefe yeast :shock:

Cheers
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charliefarley
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Re: Meine Weizen

Post by charliefarley » Sun Jun 19, 2011 9:47 pm

I think that's why I thought I'd experiment without making a starter for one half of this brew.
The small starter I did make started showing signs of going off within a couple of hours and was all fermented out in 24 hours.

I've read somewhere about stressing this yeast by pitching smaller amounts gives it much more bananary flavours, which is what I love about weizens.

WishboneBrewery
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Re: Meine Weizen

Post by WishboneBrewery » Sun Jun 19, 2011 10:29 pm

Nice :)

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