Home Brew Forum

Only a couple of pictures since nothing much has changed since my Dunkel Hefeweizen last week.

Munich Dunkel 28/10/2008

based on Protz & Wheeler’s Ayinger Altbairish Dunkel and König Ludwig Dunkel in Brew Classic European Beers At Home.

5kg Munich malt
200g chocolate malt
26g homegrown 2006 Hallertau hops for bittering
10g homegrown 2006 Hallertau hops for aroma

Mash liquor and sparge liquor had 0.5g of metabisulphite in each to kill chlorine

Mash schedule:
½ hour @ 50 ̊C
1 hour @ 66 ÌŠC

Raised mash to 78 ÌŠC for sugar solubility before sparging. The sparge temp is 85 ÌŠC which seems to keep the mash bed about 76 ÌŠC by the time the hot water has sprinkled down out of the sparging tee.

1st runnings at 18ÌŠ Brix. Sparged down to 2ÌŠ Brix - 36l of wort. The HLT ran out while sparging, so it got about three kettles-full of additional hot water before the wort was getting too thin. (Forgot to do anything about chlorine treatment in the kettle )

Boiled 1 hour in 2 boilers with 13g homegrown 2006 Hallertau hops & lidful of Irish Moss in each. I need a bigger boiler...

Boiled 5g homegrown 2006 Hallertau hops in each boiler for a further 15 minutes while sanitising immersion chillers in the hot wort.

Split the cooling water between the two chillers with a Y-adaptor.

Take two chillers into the shower?



The boiler with the quad chiller took 24 minutes to go down to 23 ÌŠC, then I gave the single chiller the full flow from the hose and it took a further 10 minutes to get to 23 ÌŠC.

Slightly too much wort to go in one brewing bin, so 23 litres in a bin, 3 litres in a demijohn, and 600ml into the freezer in plastic boxes for future starters

Wort in bin: OG 1050 @ 20 ÌŠC = 1050.8 @ 15.5 ÌŠC

Wort in demijohn: OG 1056 @ 21 ÌŠC = 1057 @ 15.5 ÌŠC (this must be some weird stratification of wort concentration thing, or measurement errors).

Rehydrated two packets of Saflager S-23 in 250ml of water with 2 tsp of gran about 11pm on Monday 27th. This was looking quite enthusiastic by Tuesday morning, so stepped it up to 1 litre with some thin (1015) wheat malt wort from the freezer, and that was doing well by pitching time (17:15 on Tues.).

Starter in a small demijohn:



Pitched most of the starter into the bin, and the bottom 1½ cm into the demijohn.

29/10/2008
9 a.m. - about 1 cm of foam in the brewing bin, and the demijohn is glupping a couple of times a minute.

The idea is to give it a day in the front room to get the fermentation going strongly, then put it in the cold shed (we had snow last night!) for a fortnight, then bring it indoors again for a day to give the yeast a diacetyl rest, then back in the shed for a few weeks, based on Ant Hayes's talk on yeast management at the last LAB meeting. I’m not sure when I'll rack it into a fermenter...

Nice One! Love the dual chillers shot!

One question - how do you work out how much sodium met to add to your liquor? I just chuck about a teaspoon into 46l of water, but there's no reason behind that amount, and now I'm worried it's too much!

Sod met - I read on here somewhere that you add one Campden tablet to about 20 litres, and Wikipedia says that one tablet = 0.44g of sodium metabisulphite. I have been weighing it (on a piece of foil) on my little Maplin scales which will do 0.1g.

I don't think your teaspoon in 46 litres should be a problem, since the sulphur dioxide (the active agent which eats chlorine and chloramine; and sanitises things not terribly well) will come out of the liquor as you heat it, as well as reacting with the chlorine. It apparently acts as an anti-oxidant as well - good for reducing the quasi-mythical hot-side oxidation of the wort

Darn it, wish I'd caught Ant's yeast talk.... looking good there E1N.

SW - Ant's email re the 2nd of October meeting had the yeast handout attached. If you haven't got it let me know and I'll email it to you. The lager yeast scheme (graph on page 2) is apparently from research which shows you can make a lager in three weeks instead of four months... I'm a little sceptical, but it'll do no harm to let the yeast multiply up a bit before I send it out in the cold, and likewise the diacetyl rest at two weeks.

Could you email me the yeast handout E1N? Can you go into any more detail about the yeast talk?

I was thinking about getting a dunkel on soon, your recipe looks good.

Mysterio - Ant Hayes's Yeast talk covered the acid washing he mentions here (Mike Dixon has a different one here on Home Brew Digest), plus culturing-up yeast from White Labs vials to pitching quantities, why bother saving a yeast bank in your fridge, and the whole subject of how much yeast to pitch. Some of your posts would suggest you know how to do that stuff already!

I've emailed Ant to ask if it's OK to send you the handout.

(edit) Ant's old home brewing club, the Wort Hog Brewers, have some good yeast stuff on their website - some of it reads as if Ant wrote it Look at Resources - Technical Library - Yeast.

Mysterio - PM sent.

Could you send it again E1N? I think it got bounced because my inbox was full.

Another PM sent

Just realised I messed up the days of the week in the blurb above, so I've done an edit and fixed them.

Today I racked it into a fermenter, having failed to move the bin to the shed on Wednesday because the head was only really apparent on Wednesday (I wanted to make sure the yeast had multiplied up enough before putting the poor thing out in the cold), and not on Thursday either because the outlaws took us on the Fullers brewery tour, so the rest of the day passed in an alcoholic haze.

The tap leaked on the first fermenter I tried, so I racked it into another one before putting a new tap on the first one for racking the Dunkel Hefeweizen into.

PG 1016 @ 16 ÌŠC so ABV 4.49% using HMRC fudge factor of 0.129

I've saved about a litre and a half of S-23 sludge in a small demijohn, which I intend to acid-wash and use for another batch, possibly a Schwarzbier, on my day off next week. I have to go back to work after five weeks off...

PG 1016 @ 10 ÌŠC = 1015.3 @ 15.5 ÌŠC so ABV 4.6% using HMRC fudge factor of 0.129

Following the disappointing priming of my other autumn 2008 beers (light and dark hefeweizens and the oatmeal stout) I thought the Dunkel would like to be re-pitched for priming.

I racked it into a bottling bin, onto 220g of gran (44 bottles x 4.6g [level 5ml teaspoon] = 220g), and stirred-in 12g of S-04 rehydrated in 250ml of boiled water.

(I read somewhere that it's OK to use a top-fermenting yeast for priming, and S-04 drops out wonderfully).

Stirred occasionally for the next hour or so while sanitising bottles. Filled 44 x 500ml bottles with Little Bottler & syphon.

It tastes almost authentic, if currently completely flat, with malt things going on and a bit of noble hop there. I bet LAB won't like it

It did get some serious lagering. The primary and secondary were mostly in the 10 to 15 ÌŠC range apart from the diacetyl rest, then it got seriously cold in December so we probably had five weeks of -4 ÌŠC to + 5 ÌŠC out of ten weeks fermenting and lagering. I might do the same bottling process to my Schwarzbier tomorrow.