Another wheat beer . . .

[yashicamat]

Decided to have a go at this wheat beer lark as I do quite like them. Aiming for an easy drinking bock style wheat beer rather than a turbocharged high gravity beer. This is what I'm thinking:

1671g wheat malt (50%)
1504g low-colour maris otter (45%)
167g rolled outs (porridge!) (5%) note: idea I picked up from searching on here, apparently will help with the sparge?

Hallertaer hops for bittering to 20 IBUs but no aroma additions.

1035 OG (I've dropped my usual efficiency of 83% to 80% as apparently wheat is slightly lower efficiency?).

Danstar Munich wheat beer yeast.

Hoping to get a beer of about 3.5% abv ish assuming the yeast attenuates down to 1008 although I have no idea how attenuative this yeast is.

Cheers.

[mysterio]

Wheat session beer, sounds like it might be nice

Porridge oats won't help the sparge... they'll make it worse. I think you're thinking of oat husks which you can get from the HBS. Generally you're fine with wheat malt though which isn't bad to lauter. It might be a tad slower than an all barley malt mash but not unworkable especially if your sparge water is hot enough.

You would need the oat husks if you were using large quantities of unmalted wheat/rolled oats though.

[yashicamat]

Wheat session beer, sounds like it might be nice

Porridge oats won't help the sparge... they'll make it worse. I think you're thinking of oat husks which you can get from the HBS. Generally you're fine with wheat malt though which isn't bad to lauter. It might be a tad slower than an all barley malt mash but not unworkable especially if your sparge water is hot enough.

You would need the oat husks if you were using large quantities of unmalted wheat/rolled oats though.

Ah right, cheers. Yeah I'll replace the oats with pale malt instead then. Thinking of dropping the IBUs to about 15 actually as the gravity is quite low.

[yashicamat]

Planning to brew this one this weekend. What water treatment should wheat beers have? Should I be aiming for a similar makeup to a pale-ale?

[Barley Water]

I make a fair amount of heffe so it follows that I have screwed up a few in my time. Anyway, one of my #&^%up's is relevant to your situation. I got really lousy extract effiency on a batch I did a few years ago and ended up with about 1.040 O.G. (I really want it around 1.050 to 1.052). Because I mashed at around 150-152F, I ended up with really thin tasting beer. Although I got the bananna/clove effect I was looking for, it really didn't work too well with a beer that thin. If you want to make a beer with a low abv, I would consider mashing really hot (as much as 158F) otherwise I fear you will end up in the same situation I found myself in.

By the way, I did come up with a good way of getting rid of the beer even though I didn't care for it too much myself. I opened up the keg and added some of that cherry extract stuff. I then fed it to the women at a brew club party and they loved it, go figure?

[yashicamat]

Just checked this one. I only achieved an OG of 1038 as the sparge got totally messed up and I ended up batch sparging instead using the grain bag (which I had put the grains in as a precaution!).

Finished now at 1009 (was expecting it to finish a bit lower than this actually), tastes very nice. I ended up putting 8g of Hallertauer in for the last 10 mins too. Needed a lot of hops though even just for 20 IBU as the AA was only 2.8% .

Initial tastings are good (given it's "flat" and at room temperature), not really getting any clove or banana tastes, but the hops have a nice (but not too bold) presence, with a lovely overall taste which finishes remarkably complex for a beer that was brewed 6 days ago! Overall impressed, going to probably corny this one tonight and force carb. I can see this being a very good summer beer, very quaffable