Wanted: wheat beer recipe

[alwilson]

Evening chaps,

I rather fancy having a fiddle about with a wheat beer. The kind of cloudy heffe type.

Firstly what kind of wheat is typical? Malted, flaked or hopefully not torrified?

What kind of ratio of wheat to pale or lager malt?

Finally, does any have a 19th centuryish recipe as im rather enjoying some older style recipes?

Cheers all
Alex

[simco999]

I use 50% Wheat malt to 50% Pale or Lager malt. I believe you can go up to 60% wheat. I must admit I don't experiment much.

The most fun is trying different types of hops with it.

Very important to use the right yeast as well. WLP300 is a good one from White labs.

Try this one:

viewtopic.php?f=24&t=45317&hilit=+wheat

Edit - OK I was trying to use up my Wheat for that one!!

[alwilson]

Aye, cheers Sim.

I've got a kilo of calypso hops, im thinking of taken out on this maiden wheat voyage... Or maybe rakau, they have such little aroma anyway maybe they'll do something useful at -10 or -15 and let the munich yeast handle the aroma.

Did your malted wheat give you a cloudy finish? That's what im wanting to achieve - I heard somewhere that you need to use flaked wheat for the protein haze?

Cheers
Al

[simco999]

Yes - I seem to get the haze just by using wheat. Some people stick 250g of Porridge oats in as well. I've tried it with good results.

Some nice sounding hops there - I need to give them a go at some point. I've heard good things about Rakau.

[alwilson]

Rakau for me, we're very underwhelming at aroma, brewed a 1060 100% pale, and had 250g below 80c and I cant smell a thing

Nice (very subtle) taste though, these are bloody expensive given the quantity i needed to be noticeable.

[Wolfy]

Cloudy wheat beer that they call a hefeweizen, but it's an American Wheat with no weird-yeast-character (which I liked):
viewtopic.php?f=24&t=52631

[Barley Water]

Well I brewed an American wheat yesterday with sort of a twist. The formulation is 1lb of caravienna, 50% malted wheat and the rest American 2 row to get an OG. of about 1.050. The twist is that this stuff is hop bursted. IBU's are only about 35 but the majority of the hops are late and dry hopped. I bittered with a little bit of Warrior then did flavor hops at 5 minutes, 1 minute and flamout of Centenial and Simcoe (I would rather have used Amarillo but you can't get any over here right now). I'm going to dry hop with a combination of all three about 0.5 oz each in a 5 gallon batch. I can smell the hops in the unfermented wort so I am optimistic, we will see how this works out. With luck, this will be a wheat version of an American APA, you know like chewing on pine scented grapefruit.

[alwilson]

Is hop bursting the act of acquiring your bitterness mostly from late hops?

[SchemieRadge]

Consider using Wyeast 3638 instead of 3068 or WLP300. After 4 attempts at a hefe (extract) I found that was the missing link for me.. I much preferred it - still slightly banana-ey but much more complex and interesting imo.

[Brewmeister]

When we did a short run wheat we used Wyeast 3638 and it worked very well

[Barley Water]

Yeah I would say hop bursting is just jamming most of the hops into the end of the brewing cycle, including dry hopping. It gets you a ton of hop flavor and aroma but is not necessarily bitter.

By the way for you guys doing a German Heffe, it's all about temperature control, the actual % of wheat in the grist is not the critical factor in making this style well (although >50% is required in the "Fatherland"),

[Lugsy]

I do a pretty simple Hefeweizen recipe, about 50% wheat, 40% Pilsner and 10% Munich but use a fairly complex mashing schedule to get the most out of the grains. A ferulic acid rest at 43C for at least 15 minutes, a protein rest at 55C for 15-30 minutes, saccharification at 66C and then mash out at about 75C. I do decoctions for two of these and infusions for the others. The ferulic rest is to get more clove flavours and the decoctions give a good malty flavour as well as getting very high efficiency, typically 90-odd percent. For the hops I use traditional German varieties, Tettnang is my favourite so far but Hallertau is good too, one addition at 90 minutes to 12 IBU is enough - nothing late, this is all about the yeast. Pitch the yeast as low as you can, 13 is good but nearly impossible to reach at this time of year, then raise it to 17-18 for most of the ferment and finish off at 20-21C. I've used WLP300 in the past but I've just started branching out with other yeasts - my current one is using WLP351 and I've got some WLP380 for the next one. If you don't fancy such a complicated mash you can just do a single infusion and you'll still get good beer but the decoctions really make it if you've got a spare two hours to add to your brewday

[seymour]

Is hop bursting the act of acquiring your bitterness mostly from late hops?

No, not really. It's an over-the-top American process (I think first popularized by Dogfish Head Brewery?) to brew crazy hoppy IPAs. You know how conventional wisdom says to utilize early and late hops, or perhaps three stages: e.g. boil 60 minutes for bitterness, 30 minutes for flavor, and 15 minutes for aroma?
Well, hop bursting is done by adding new hop additions, for instance every ten minutes, throughout the entire boil: 60 minutes, 50 minutes, 40 minutes, 30 minutes, 20 minutes, 10 minutes, + flame-out, + dry-hop in primary, + dry-hop in secondary, + rack through a hop-back at bottling...you get the idea. It is meant to wash over your senses with every imaginable manifestation of hops bitterness, flavor and aroma. A brewer friend of mine only makes beer this way, and declares it "the perfect lasagna beer!!!" Whatever, man. The result, of course, is usually so much oil and vegetal matter in suspension the beer tastes like insanely bitter brocolli stew. That said, I've tasted a few beautifully well-executed examples as well, usually involving an equally strong and complex malt backbone.

For more info, check-out the Dream IPA kit from Northern Brewer. You can even preview the instructional PDF for free.

[DaveyT]

I always bang on about this recipe, but it's awesome:
51% barley malt
40% wheat malt
10% crystal malt (wheat if you can get it)
OG 1.1045
Styrian bittering to 27IBU
Saaz at flame out (as much as you want) with 10g of crushed coriander seeds.
I've only tried the extract version so apologies if there are any glaring errors. I think the general idea is there, though.
It's ace!

David

[seymour]

...I rather fancy having a fiddle about with a wheat beer. The kind of cloudy heffe type...

Just curious. Did you end up brewing and if so, how's it turning out?