Absolute Homebrew

A wheat beer for home. Wheat beers are a great summer style. They should also be the first choice for when you need a beer in a hurry. It doesn’t matter whether you make the wort from grain or a tin, wheat beers are meant to be drunk young and fresh. My boast with one wheat beer is 145 hours from pitching to drinking.

The grain bill was:
2250 grams wheat malt
2000 g pilsner malt
50 g acid malt
50 g Caramalt

There are a couple of ideas with this grain bill. Firstly, while wheat malt will quite happily mash away it doesn’t have a husk like barley so drawing off the sweet wort can be tricky. About 50% wheat malt is still OK if you are using a false bottom. Using both a grain bag and a false bottom together you can push it to about 75% wheat malt. Another technique is to add rice hulls to the mash to provide the phsyical structure you need to draw off the sweet wort from the spent grain.

A touch of acid malt just keeps a bit of structure in the flavour. And, a touch of Caramalt to give a salt and pepper effect.

I mash quite thinly - here 4.35 kg in 20 litres. So with a strike temperature of only 72 degrees a mash temp. of 68 degrees was achieved. With a thin mash conversion is quite quick. It does also tend to favour beta amylase so although I am currently favouring drier tasting beers I probably need to be careful to not let the beers become too dry.

Hopping was Perle and Hallertau to about 20 IBU in a single 45 minute addition.

The yeast was recycled Safbrew WB-06. And the OG was about 1040.

As of today, September this beer is more or less ready to be kegged, gassed and drunk.

Yes I know it’s shockingly late, but don’t let that stop you from reading on.

This demonstration beer was a wheat beer - chosen to give the new Fermentis WB-06 wheat yeast a spin. Now, the beer is already on tap at Faulconbridge and it has come up pretty well. This is a genuine strain of wheat yeast. At this stage I haven’t heard anything about the actual strain. I am prepared to be wrong, it doesn’t taste like the 3068 strain.

The grain bill was:
200 grams Caramalt
2000 grams Joe White Pilsener malt
2000 grams Joe White wheat malt

The mash temp was 67 - a degree lower than I wanted, but it was a demonstration after all.

Hopping was a mixture of Perle and Hallertau to about 20 IBU.

The resultant beer is a little bit dry by wheat beer standards. It has a nice fermentation flavour, although not too strong as fermentaion was at about 18 or 19 degrees.