Today’s experiment was to make a simple, crowd-pleasing wheat beer. To accomplish this, I made up a recipe of:
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3.3 lbs. Wheat LME
3 lbs. Wheat DME
1 oz. Willamette hops
1 lbs. Crystal malt from 2-row barley (60L)
The yeast was the yeast after transferring from secondary from both the Paving Tar Stout, and the Caribou Slobber. Some priming sugar was added and the result aerated a couple hours before brewing, to give the yeast a chance to start multiplying – and from the pressure in the container when it was opened, it seems they did just that!
Steeping grains were added at 165 degrees and steeped for 20 minutes. The wort was brought to a boil and the LME and DME added. Most of the hops were added early for bittering, with the last added about 10 minutes from the end of the boil for aroma. I didn’t want to have a highly hopped beer, which drove this decision.
Given that this is an all-wheat beer, it is expected to ferment a bit violently. To help contain the brew, whirlfloc was added shortly before flame-out, and Fermcap-S was used in the primary fermenter. This should contain the brew and prevent it from doing anything dastardly to the brew room.
As the recipe was my own, the expected gravity was not known. We obtained an original gravity (OG) of 1.060 however, which is quite reasonable.
