I haven't brewed in a while due to several factors: 1) Drinking less beer, 2) Busy with work and 3) On a quest to get really fit.
However - it's coming up to our yearly local airshow for which our back garden is a prime seat so we always have a party with lots of BBQ and Beer. So - time to get a couple of brews on in time to celebrate.
I fancied doing some nice summery beers, and the first up is a Weiss. It was going to be a classic German Weiss, but I decided to add some tropical type aroma hops at the end to see if they complement the typical banana flavours of the yeast. We'll see how well that works in August....
So without further ado, here's Flugschau (Airshow) Weiss
Grain Bill:
2.5 Kg Wheat Malt
2.25 Kg Lager Malt
0.25Kg Aromatic Malt (bit like Munich I think...)
All my malts are fairly old, but they've all been kept cool and dry and seemed to be in good nick.
Hops:
20g Bobek 5.2% AA 45 mins
10g Citra 13.8% AA 5 mins
10g Citra 13.8% AA 80C steep
The hops are also fairly old - but they've all been stored vac packed and frozen and they smell great!
Yeast is 1 vial of WLP300 Hefeweisen yeast. I normally get a lot of banana flavour from this yeast, so combined with the pineapple and lychee notes I seem to get from Citra, it should be interesting.
Other stuff was Protafloc and water treatment to the "General Purpose" setting in Graham's water calculator.
Off we go...
The good old brewery up and running again after a battle with spiders and their webs that seem to have set up home over the last few months. Sorry about the grainy pics - some idiot left the camera set to 3200 ISO. Doh!
Bucket 'o Grain. Wheat, lager and aromatic malts
Oat hulls. I soaked these in a pan of water overnight and then rinsed them this morning. Good thing too as the water they'd been steeping in ended up pretty dark and smelled strongly of oats. I've always just bunged these in the mash dry before, but I won't be doing that again.
Mashed in. Here's where I had a problem. I mashed in at 72C, but ended up with a mash temp of 63C. I put it down to the oat hulls being cold as they had only recently been rinsed out with water. Classic schoolboy error. Oh well.....bung in 1.5L of boiling water....
And we end up at 65.9C. Good enough for Government work.
Here's the hops.....teensy amounts compared to my "usual". Bobek at the back and Citra at the front. Sparge went great....like a racehorse pi55ing.
After a 15 minute boil (and before any hop additions) I drew off some of the wort. This will be used to grow a vial of WLP500 Trappist Ale Yeast as I intend to do an Abbey Singel on Monday. The starter is now on the stir plate.
I'm going retro all the way today. No pump, no plate chiller. Just the good old IC and gravity to assist. Boil almost done - it'll be a 60 min build (and 60 min mash) today due to time pressures. I'm doing a 100 mile cycle ride tomorrow and need time to fettle my bike....
Hoppy crap left over after the runoff.
Which resulted in 23L of wort
Which got aerated and pitched with a single vial of WLP300 - no starter. No time for a starter today really, but here's hoping that it'll take off OK. These vials are MEANT to be good for 23L "as is", but the only other time I pitched one with no starter it failed. It was into an imperial stout though.... Anyway, I'm hoping that as it's fairly warm right now the yeast should be fine and the explosive growth phase will give me plenty of banana esters. Fingers crossed.
And finally, the money shot. 1.044 SG which is about right given that I added water and stole some of the wort earlier.
Done, dusted and tidied up in time for lunch. Felt great to get a brew on after such a long hiatus.
One more planned for Monday. I'll run out of time after that as I'm off to Burgundy on my hold next Saturday so I need to get the Weiss and the Singel out of the primary FVs by then....
