Extract Dunkelweizen Recipe - does this look ok?

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ProjectBeer

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Hi Guys,

This will be my 3rd extract brew. I'm quite fond of dunkelweizens and so is my brother so I wanted to brew one to appease him for letting my have all my brewing equipment in the flat!

I've found a recipe online, let me know how it looks:

Batch size: 20L
OG 1.049
Expected FG: 1.013
IBU: 20.57
ABV: 4.79%
SRM 19.62

3kg Wheat LME (73%)
1kg German Caramel Wheat (24.3%)
115g German Chocolate Wheat (2.8%)
50g Tettnanger (3.2AA) at 60mins

WLP300 Hefeweizen Ale Yeast
 
I'm sorry, i've not used those specialty malts myself, so don't know what they're like, but the SRM they give you is suitable for the style. With the dark malts being wheat, and presumably about 60% of the extract being made from wheat, it means about 71% of your beer is wheat malt. If it were me, i'd go a tad less, maybe replace some of the caramel wheat with Munich or Vienna malt, but that's just me, I'm sure yours will be fine.

the IBU's seem a little high. I generally go for about 14 ibu's for this style.

WLP300 is an excellent yeast.

Although you're told to drink wheat beers young, I actually preferred them after a month or two. By then there were not many left sadly. They were more rounded, and still plenty of fresh bananary goodness!
 
Here's a Dunkelweizen clone for comparison...

Hacker Pschorr Weisse Dark

5 gallons (19 litres); OG = 1.055 to 1.056; FG = 1.011 to 1.012;* IBU = 13

Ingredients

8 oz. German Munich malt
7 oz. Belgian cara-Munich malt
1 oz. British chocolate malt
6.25 lbs. Muntons wheat dry malt extract (DME)
4 AAUs Tettnanger bittering hops (1 oz. at 4% alpha acid)
 
Ah good spot - no idea why I've got the IBUs at 20, will change to 15ish.

Was initially trying to clone the Franziskaner Dunkelweizen as it's my brother's favourite, but recipes for it seem to be virtually non-existent. I know their yeast is proprietary, but apart from that I couldn't turn up too much.
 
Ok so I brewed this on Sunday. Everything went according to plan. I got to try out my new wort chiller and I had made a yeast starter out of WLP300 on Friday night to pitch on Sunday.

Starting OG was lower than expected at 1.044 and I ended up with about 18.5L in the FV, after having lost a couple of litres in the kettle to trub. I did use some of the LME to make the yeast starter so maybe that's the reason for the difference?

Note to self: LME sucks...

I took a gravity reading today (Weds) as airlock activity has slowed immensely, and it's at 1.015, so a little further to go still.

Hayley1.jpg


Hayley2.jpg


Hayley3.jpg
 
Hmm I'm a little confused. So I looked up the wheat LME I got from the Malt Miller and it says for making a yeast starter, use 180g in a litre of water to hit a gravity of 1036.

So scaling this up to 20 litres, it would need 3.6kg of LME to make 20L of wort at 1036...is that right? So I'm guessing the values used on Brewer's Friend for wheat LME were incorrect? So does this suggest I actually got a nice bit of efficiency steeping the 1kg of Caramalt to raise the OG?

Confused...
 
Putting your LME into Brewmate I get an OG of 1046 with 3kg of Wheat LME, so it looks like you didn't get much if any sugar out of the grains? You will get flavour and colour of course, but steeping doesn't extract much sugar.
 
clibit said:
Putting your LME into Brewmate I get an OG of 1046 with 3kg of Wheat LME, so it looks like you didn't get much if any sugar out of the grains? You will get flavour and colour of course, but steeping doesn't extract much sugar.
Click to expand...

Yea that's what I initially thought - and you're right (I blame my tired brain last night!).

I've just had a quick mess around with Brewer's Friend and 3kg of Wheat LME in 20L comes to 1.044. The 1kg of Cara Wheat I used apparently brings it up to 1.049, but I guess in reality it was much less. Ah well, I won't be using LME again anyway as I'm planning 1 or 2 more extract brews and then I'll be building my mash tun :)
 
Brewing recipe calculators tend to assume that you are mashing the specialty grains with pale malt and will get decent sugar extraction, which often isn't the case, even if you mash them, I suspect. If you are steeping them it makes sense to leave them out of the OG calculations.
 
Bah, I'll take em with a pinch of salt next time. It's just that on the Brewer's Friend site, when you select Extract as the brew method, it has a Steeping Grains section so I assumed they knew what they were talking about.
 
ProjectBeer said:
Bah, I'll take em with a pinch of salt next time. It's just that on the Brewer's Friend site, when you select Extract as the brew method, it has a Steeping Grains section so I assumed they knew what they were talking about.
Click to expand...

Maybe they do! I don't use Brewers Friend.
 
The Brewmate software and Brewers friend online calculator are different.
 
Bottling Day today. The beer finished at 1013, so that's 4.07%. Smells very much like a dunkelweizen. No cold crashing or nylon bag filtering in case too many beasties get taken out of suspension.

Priming to 3.5 CO2 volumes.

I was a little worried about the beer when I took the lid off the FV as I wasn't used to seeing so much "stuff" on the top, but after some googling, it seems like it's ok. I was a little worried about a yeast infection as when I took the gravity sample it seemed a little fizzy already and tasted ever so slightly carbonated.

Photo 01-08-2015 14 05 26.jpg
 

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