I'm a sucker for wheat beer, and here in NM I long for something like the Edelweiss Dunkel I used to drink in Austria. It's nowhere to be found, so with Clark's help I tried to brew one, for our 12th beer. Sadly, along with the Roggenbier it fell victim to voracious wild yeast when we diluted it with unboiled tap water to reduce the starting gravity after the boil. We learned from that mistake and this morning we're having another go at brewing dunkelweisen.
The recipe is based on the Trigo Oscuro on p194 of Brewing Classic styles.
Notes during the brew:
- HLT water heated to ~175 F
- Originally transferred 4 gallons to MLT and added grain. Deemed not enough water, added 1/2 gallon more. Temperature was suprisingly low: 147F. Boiled about 1.5 gallons, added around 20 minutes into mash. New temperature was 153F -- phew. Hope this is not too dilute now; still seems like a nice thick mash. We mashed for 70 minutes instead of an hour in hopes of not coming in too low on the gravity.
- Vorlauf and lautering went well except the grain bed was channelized around the edges.
- We forgot to heat the strike water until it was time to strike so the grain sat for a while while the strike water heated.
- First lauter didn't get us up to high enough volume. We ended up sparging twice more.
- Boil started with 8.5 gallons, hopped with 1oz Hallertau from the beginning (first wert hop).
- Pre-boil gravity: 1.045
- Took about 30 mins to get to rolling boil, then boiled for 90 minutes.
- After boil, gravity was high, around 1.06 (target was 1.55) and volume was at 6 gallons, so we decided to dilute it, and then boiled for another 10 minutes or so. We used 0.4 gallons of tap water, which we calculated using the following equation (conservation of sugar!):
([gal wort])*([gravity of wort])+([theoretical total volume wort] - [gal wort])=([target gravity])*[theoretical total volume wort]
This equation was off by a factor of 2-3.
- We chilled using the HLT as a cold reservoir, with 40 lbs ice. We didn't need that much; cooling went very fast and we were at 74F in less than 20 minutes. The yeast was taken out of the fridge around the beginning of cooling and pitched a few minutes after hitting 74F. Blowoff tube was installed with some difficulty.
- Yeast was encouraged verbally and yeast bottle was given a good luck kiss before pitching.
- Beer moved to fridge, which was adjusted to 60 to 64F
Transferred beer to secondary (carboy) . Gravity was still fairly high - 1.029. Clear that at least some fermentation had occurred since there was foam residue on the lid and upper inside of bucket.
ReplyDeleteTypical water / grain ratios for a mash are 1/4 to 1/2 gallon water per lb grain, so you don't need to be worried about mashing too thin as long as you're in that range.
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