First AG: PlanB - a weissbier

[TheMumbler]

My first AG brew, so I was pretty excited to get going and test my equipment. Decided to go for a weissbier as I like the style and they turn around quickly. Should be a robust test of my home made false bottom mash tun...more about that later

Recipe - weissbier (made up referencing Home Brewing by Graham Wheeler) using qbrew
23l brew length
90 min mash and 90 min boil. Batch Sparging.

3kg Wheat Malt
2.5kg Lager Malt (intended to be 2kg but after splitting a 1.5kg bag I added the wrong portion)

60 mins Mount Hood (aa 4.0%) 22g
15 mins Mount Hood (aa 4.0% 12g
15 mins Irish Moss

Yeast is a White Labs WLP351 Bavarian Weissen
mash ratio a bit less than 3:1 due to the addition of the extra 500g of lager malt

target OG 1056
bitterness 12
recipe colour 4

A nice sunday lie in and then brewing. Only one heating vessel in action so it has to serve as HLT and boiler today.

Set Up


grain


hops


Mashing in I have a nasty feeling I can feel the false bottom floating around as I stir the mash. Curse my shoddy workmanship
Mash temperature is 66 degrees celcius and there is no measurable heat loss after for 90mins.

Sparge1

Arrgh it stuck within seconds of starting to run so I grab the mashing/sparging bag and a spare FV put aside for just such an eventuality. Credit and thanks to Chris-x1 for suggesting this to somebody else in a thread on Jim's. Research pays off

Plan B


Gravity of 1046 @ 51 degrees celcius, I don't know whether that it is useful information but I took note just in case.

Sparge2

1014 @ 54 degrees celcius

Remember to put the hop filter in when employed as a boiler! And a rolling boil. Hops added after 30 and 75 mins in my 90 min boil. Multiple alarms with text are a big feature of todays brew.


However the filter falls off as I haven't attached the hop filter properly resulting in a very slow drain and a bit less wort being collected. On the plus side it does run off and the wort is filtered by a couple of hop flowers that got into the tap.



Wort is cooled with a home made immersion chiller which results in some flooding (so no pictures) and a lot of messing about but no harm to the wort. The stuck mash and much mopping and cleaning makes it a long day probably (around 8 hours) time for a beer

Twenty one litres of wort collected with an OG of 1051. Around 20 hours later fermentation seems to be well under way


I had thought I was doing brilliantly for hitting pretty much the target volume and the target OG but taking into account the extra 500g of lager malt I should have been looking at 1056. Still overall I'm happy to have collected a decent quantity of wort at the right kind of OG. Fingers crossed for a drinkable pint at the end of it. Mash tun to be examined, modified and re-tested.

[crookedeyeboy]

Theres nothing like those 1stAG mishaps! Although I still seem to be doing them!! haha

[TheMumbler]

You seem to be brewing at a blistering pace there crooked eyed boy

I doubt my next one will be problem free. I suppose refining your gear to achieve your own "perfect" set up is part of the fun

Disasters aside I've just dropped into the secondary. Tested the gravity and had a taste. Gravity is down to 1034 and the wort tastes good, oddly it seems sweeter than I remember the boiled wort being, I would have thought that losing a bit less than half of the sugars to fermentation would have made it less sweet. Also the end taste of bitterness present in the boiled wort seems to have gone. All being well I think it will end up as a fairly decent beer.

[crookedeyeboy]

I have found this hobby to be ridculously addictive thats why im going mad with it, hopefully Ill have far more beer than I can drink coming up to Xmas!

Ive got my time down to 5 hours so it means I can do one in the week as well

[TheMumbler]

If you brew 80 pints a week and you don't have far more beer than you can drink coming up to Christmas you have a serious drink problem or a lot of friends. Mind you producing 80 pints a week is likely to make you popular

[crookedeyeboy]

Haha too popular! Im feeling a little stingy though, I keep telling people 'oh yeah im brewing beer ill give you one' then I think' hang on, thats one less beer for me!!' maybe I have got a drinking problem

I think Id rather send one in here for a review than waste it on the uninitiated! haha

[Barley Water]

First just a stupid question, how come you use Irish Moss in a weisbier are you trying to make the Crystal version?

I also had problems with grain getting under my false bottom. What I did was drill a hole right through the screen and through the bottom of my Gott cooler mashtun. I then installed a threaded bolt up through the bottom of the mashtun and up through the screen from the bottom. I use a wing nut to pin the screen to the bottom of the mashtun which keeps grain from getting under there and plugging things up (it also makes it easy to clean as some stuff will for sure go right through the holes in the screen). You also want to add some sealent around the bolt to keep things from leaking.

This arrangement has worked very well for me however, you can still get a stuck mash (see my recent thread concerning that subject). Wheat malt is notorious for causing stuck mashes because there is no husk to help with lautering. The fix here is just to add a pound of rice hulls which hopefully you can source at your local homebrew supply store.

[TheMumbler]

First just a stupid question, how come you use Irish Moss in a weisbier are you trying to make the Crystal version?

Honestly? I just assumed that it wanted it (I'm not sure why), although re-consulting the recipe in Home Brewing there is no Irish Moss. Isn't the cloudiness in a Hefe supposed to come from the yeast though? I thought it just meant yeast in German...Food for thought anyway.

I prefer Hefe to Crystal (more taste to it in my view) but I'll be delighted if I get a decent pint at the end of it.

Thanks for the tip on the mash tun. I was wondering about simply covering the end of the tube with a bit of muslin but your solution sounds good. I do like the problem solving aspect of this hobby My local homebrew store is pretty useless so I'd be amazed if they stock rice hulls. I guess I could mail them but I'm not sure how easy they are to get on this side of the pond.

[lancsSteve]

Nice one mate look forward to trying it!

push the hop strainer in firmer next time I never had a problem with it make sure it's against the bottom and should be ok

Irish moss not needed but should help settle hot break out

good luck on sorting false bottom, or maybe make a manifold?

your 12kg of Marris otter is at mine if youwant to collect from swmbo before Friday