Wheat Beer (really simple recipe, split 4 ways and made a PITA!)

With only one hop addition at first wort this recipe is brilliant for doing at the same time as cooking dinner on a school night. I finished work at 5, and was washed up and tidied by 9:30.

Made about 25l, I lost a lot to the floor due to a failed o-ring!

3kg malted wheat
2kg malted barley (extra pale)

30g Perle hops (4% AAU)

Mashed at 65C for 1 hour

Hops at first wort

Boil for 60min

*At this point I put aside 5l of hot wort into a demi john and sealed with an airlock. What I planned to do was culture up some yeast, inoculate the wort with lactobacteia for 24h, boil, cool, add yeast, and ferment to make a pseudo Berliner Weiss. What I should have done is inoculate it 24h before bottling, then boiled and just pitched a ladel full of the trub from the primary FV. Making a starter of a yeast that won't floculate is a pain in the rectum!

1 packet of Mangrove Jack M20.

OG 1.048, Fermented in primary for ~5 days in a 20C 'fridge' , it hit 1.011, I was in a hurry so didn't wait to see how low it would go and being Wheat beer pretty much any 'off' flavours for an English ale are to style!

Bottled with sugar for 3.0 carbonation volumes and left another few days at 20+C. At this point I spilt 2x5l into demi johns and added 300g of raspberries and 450g of black fruits (sour cherries, blackcurrant, blackberry, grape,). Fruits were brought to 90C in saucepans and poured into sanitised demi johns, allowed to cool then the beer added. Haven't bottled these yet so will report back soon.

Looks:
Golden, hazey, loads of head which dies back to 1/4" and never disappears.

Aroma:
Peaches, banana, vanilla

Taste:
Like it smells, I get a lot of banana, the OH thinks cream soda (vanilla), a subtle hopyness and bitterness, quite sweet, I haven't yet taken a final gravity from a bottlem but it has to be <1.011, but I do prefer my beers dry as a bone. Warm and Boozey too. The residual bitterness afterwards combined with the immediate sweetness makes me want to drink it far too quickly.

Summary:
Will be brewing this again! Same summery, BBQ, easy drinking, fruity characteristics of an IPA, with only a fraction of the hops!

Soured wort is boiled and cooled and 'yeast' pitched. Gravity dropped from 1.048 to 1.043 which is about what you'd expect and hopefully means no other infections took hold.

To be honest there was barely more yeast in the starter than there would have been in a bottle of English ale despite 5 steps! Maybe it should have been cold crashed for even longer but lesson learnt, next time rack from primary to secondary early and bottom crop this yeast from the secondary next time, or just buy 2 packets!



We'll see what happens next.

Well in the words of the Dropkick Murphys "Their numbers were few but they did the job of many", came downstairs this morning to the sight of krausen merrily spewing forth out the top of the airlock.

Bottled the fruitbeers last night, slightly disappointing (compared to the heffeweizen), taste watery and a lot of the banana/clove/vanilla has either been mopped up or masked by the fruit. At the moment I'm preferring the black fruits one, you can certainly taste the sour cherries.

Will see how they turn out once carbonated in a few days.

Berliner weisse is bubbling away nicely :)

Im thinking you made this several days before you put teh OP up as its only a few days??

With the soured wort do you use a separate FV?

Yup, wasn't in secondary for too long though. Think it was about 4 days. Based on red wine making I thought it best to get it off the fruit again relatively quickly to prevent it going off.

Yes, the sour beer was done from 5l of wort I took out the kettle before chilling it and kept in a demijohn and pitched the yakult directly into that and left it 24h in the airing cupboard before boiling for another 10-15min and chilling and pitching the yeast.

In retrospect I would have put the lactobacteria in at the start and just left it, apparently it's self limiting and won't over sour anyway. Then boiled it after the primary was done and just poured some yeasty trub out of the primary into it.