Taste – Banana, citrus, a little bit of grapefruit – it’s light and refreshing. It tastes at it’s best chilled.
Aroma – To be honest, it doesn’t smell that great (but then again, there’s not many hefe’s that I like the aroma of), there’s a bit of a sulphur hint, along with citrus and a slight yeasty overtone.
Appearance – Light, cloudy (when you swill the yeast out of the bottle), and with a small amount of carbonation (this could do with being better next time). It looks fairly similar to the Weihenstephan hefe you can get in most UK supermarkets.
Would I brew it again? – With a few tweaks to the recipe yes – it could do with a touch more carbonation and a bit more body to it. I love a good hefeweizen so I’m determined to get this one perfect. 🙂
I’ve always liked the hefeweizen style of beer, especially on a nice warm day. It’s not too heavy, hoppy or malty and is just damn refreshing. So naturally I had to give it a go…
Hops:
13.5g Spalter Spalt whole hops (4.9% AA) added to the boil at 40 minutes
Not good...
Extras:
0.25 tsp Yeast Nutrient added to the boil at 20 minutes
Yeast:
Wyeast 3068 Weihenstephan Weizen – made into a 1 litre starter a couple of nights earlier
Water:
26 litres of Luton’s finest, boiled for 30 minutes the night before with half a camden tablet. This was cooled overnight and then I ran off 25 litres ready for brewing, leaving 1 litre and all the chalk to be disposed of.
Mash Schedule:
Mash In: 5.3 litres of water at 78℃ for 45 minutes
Mash Out: 2.1 litres of water at 98℃ for 10 minutes
Sparge: Fly sparge with 17.5 litres of water at 76℃
Look at that change in colour!
Brewed 21st January 2012
Mashed the 2kg of malt according to the schedule, and ran off 24 litres of wort at a disappointing OG of 1.019 (expected pre-boil OG was 1.029). So, I added 45g of light dried malt extract to bring the wort up to the target OG of 1.029.
After the boil, again the measured OG was way below target – I measured 1.026 in 16 litres of wort, but the expected target was 1.050 in 10 litres! So I had to add yet more extract (300g) and sugar (600g – as I ran out of extract) to bring the OG up to 1.045.
The wort was cooled using a copper immersion chiller, and then transferred into the fermentation bucket and pitched with 750ml of the yeast starter. The other 250ml was put into the fridge – we’ll see if it’s viable for another batch in the future.
Not a perfect brew day, but there’s a lot more beer there than was expected – silver linings and all that…
There was good fermentation after 18 hours, and this kept going for another 4-5 days. After 7 days, I moved the wort into the barrel, OG was measured at 1.014, where it stayed for another 7 days before bottling (primed with 58g of brewers sugar) – the FG at bottling was 1.008, so we should be looking at about 4.8% ABV in the end.
That’s enough for this post, i’ll write about the results shortly!
