I was introduced to G. Schneider & Sohn "Meine Hopfenweisse" a couple of months back. I'm a big fan of their beers but this one totally blew me away and I knew I had to attempt to copy it so I started trying to find a recipe. The only one I could find was for what I assume is an older version and I guess they've made some alterations with the one I had - the colour was much darker than anything you'd get with a 50/50 split of wheat and pilsner malt alone and the hopping didn't seem right. I decided to leave the grain bill alone but use some hops that I fancied and I came up with this:
Grist:
Wheat malt 4450g
Pilsner malt 4450g
Hops:
Magnum 14% AA 30g 60 minutes
Amarillo 10.7% AA 13g 15 minutes
Citra 15% AA 13g 15 minutes
Amarillo 10.7% AA 21g 5 minutes
Citra 15% AA 21g 5 minutes
Yeast:
WLP 300 (top cropped from another wheat beer, a couple of good ladles-full)
Protein rest 30 minutes at 50C
Saccharification 60 minutes at 65C, 30 minutes at 72C
Mash out 20 minutes at 75C
Fermented at 16C for 7 days, raise to 20C to finish
Primed with 150g of sugar.
Got my volumes and efficiency estimate wrong and ended up with 19 litres at 1.088, it finished at 1.016 so a whopping 9.6% ABV. Plus priming sugar pushes it to around the 10% mark
I was worried that the yeast might be on its last legs but it's carbonated pretty well, it's still working its way through the priming sugar but if it stops where it is (fairly lightly carbonated for a Weizen and a little sweet) I'll still be happy. The hops are great, lots more flavoursome than I'd expected for the relatively low hopping levels, and there are some other great yeast flavours in there, banana and a bit of vanilla which I've never had with WLP300 before. The alcohol is still a little hot but it's settling down nicely - it's only been in the bottle for 2 weeks but is very drinkable already. It's lighter that the one I tried but it's got plenty of body so I'm glad I didn't darken it up with any caramel type malts. All in all I'm very happy with this one
Apologies to Herr Schneider - this is not a clone, merely an interpretation
