First time AG wheat beer, thoughts before jumping off the plank/me being a newb

Okay so this is going to be my first all grain batch that incorporates wheat. My background, I BIAB, I am going to step mash in the 120's 150's and 160's. I have a sack of 2 row I plan on using in this brew.

My main question is this, how much 2 row to how much wheat? I don't want to end up making a mess or work harder than I have too with wheat goop or whatever all those people with their stuck sparges are complaining about with wheat.

I plan on using coriander and some delicious fresh lemon zest. I was thinking a late add on both is what I should be aiming for and was figuring on upping the ante on the lemon zest going into secondary.

My other question is efficiency related. I am looking to make a tame beer. I tried for a tame beer last time, overshot my efficiency by about 17% and ended up with what should be a 8.5% porter on a 10.5 lb grain bill (granted there were a couple lbs of honey in there. So I am thinking a total grain weight in the nines sounds about right..

I am really a complete nub and I am playing around with beersmith and such but every time I listen to that program all of its presets are way off compared to what happens..

Anyways I probably going to get my hands dirty in a couple days from now, so input would be very much appreciated.

Thanks!

You overshot your efficiency by 17%?!? It sounds like you need to get your parameters under wraps. Why not brew a couple of standard recipes to get your system under control?

Well it was my first time actually measuring my efficiency, so I was assuming that I would get something pretty scrubby like <70% however I got about 87%. This would be my 3rd AG, and my second time measuring the specific gravity of my brew. So I guess i didn't overshoot really considering I had nothing to make a basis for my anticipated gravity.

I guess I was just assuming that the efficiency I should get would be low considering I am new to brewing. However i am semi educated in chemistry so I understand the parameters of good extraction, so I shouldn't count myself a nub in that regard.

You know what they say, assumptions make an ass out of you.

Assuming I got near 80% efficiency on my big IPA I made I am looking at like 10%, I just bottled it today and you could def taste the booze on it.

Just to give you a hint of information, Breiss wheat malt extract is made from 65% wheat, 35% barley. From that hint, you can decide how much of each you want to work with.

Hmm...87% efficiency for brew-in-a-bag, and your first one at that? Something's fishy with those numbers. How did you calculate them?

In any case, you don't really need to worry about a stuck sparge with BIAB, so that's not a consideration.

Also, go easy on the zest, especially in secondary. A little goes a long way.

IMHO skip all those step mashes and try a single infusion batch sparge first.

evwoller said:

My main question is this, how much 2 row to how much wheat? I don't want to end up making a mess or work harder than I have too with wheat goop or whatever all those people with their stuck sparges are complaining about with wheat.Thanks!

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I would find a recipe that you might like or do like and adjust the percentages according to your efficiency. Most or some recipes will tell you what the efficiency is that the recipe was created with. So if the recipe was created on a recipe on a system that has 65% efficiency you would recaculate the grain bill based on your efficiency.

Also, I think you could add water to the wort in the kettle then boil down to the gravity you want.

Rice hulls are you friend when doing AG wheat beers.

skeezerpleezer said:

Rice hulls are you friend when doing AG wheat beers.

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+1 I forgot about that

How I calced 87% 10.5 lb grain bill into 4 gallons of water making a initial strike thickness of about 1.6 quarts per lb. Mash for about an hour to an hour and 15 minutes, the last 10 minutes being at 160. Dunk sparge in another 4 gallons of water for a further hour in the low 160's, pull, squeeze for all its worth and leave hanging above a bucket to catch residual. Pouring a light amount of fresh water over the grains to wring them again. Which left me with a wort of a little above 1.043 and a preboil volume of right around 7.5 gal. 100% efficiency should have been right at about 1.05, 43/50= 86

I don't see why 87 is even really that good to be honest I feel like 90% should be my goal every time, having gone through chemistry with a german chemist who was more anal about everything than my high school algebra teacher about showing my work...

So just follow recipe, adjust for intended alcohol by adusting by the efficiency I am expecting and be confident that there will be no issue? I mean I am not to put off by the whole thing but some of the recipes i see call for like 75% wheat, and some % 6 row. I am pretty sure this would not work out well for me considering the 2 row is supposedly less enzyme rich. Is there some kind of a enzyme concentration conversion between 2 & 6 row?

The only reason I am even wondering is someone posted on here the other day 'well I got the BIAB version of a stuck sparge'.

So before boil, you had 7.5 gallons of 1.043 wort? Off of 10.5 pounds, I'd actually expect a bit more than 1.050 theoretical potential, but it's roughly right. That's not including any of the honey, correct?

You're thinking about efficiency in the wrong terms. Having chemistry training is not going to be the thing that bumps your numbers. Simply put, if your grains are converting properly, efficiency is largely a property of how much liquid gets left behind. Squeezing the bejeezus out of the bag will do a lot, but 90% still sounds too high.

2-row and 6-row both have plenty of enzymes to convert themselves. Don't worry about that. Malted wheat has plenty, too.

No honey, and I didn't measure how much i used in my final wash and wring of the grains and did not account for that in my pre-mash, presparge water amounts. I would assume it would put my total of water consumed about 8.5 gallons. I should have sampled the final wash's for gravity just for fun

I would have to disagree chemistry training has a lot to do with beer brewing. To me, this is just another water based extraction of plant tissue. To someone who has no experience at all this is borderline magic.

Doesn't the preboil volume take into consideration the lost water? its not like I am taking my preboil gravity and attributing it to the full amount of premash/sparge water.

evwoller said:

No honey, and I didn't measure how much i used in my final wash and wring of the grains and did not account for that in my pre-mash, presparge water amounts. I would assume it would put my total of water consumed about 8.5 gallons. I should have sampled the final wash's for gravity just for fun

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Hmm...I'm not following you here. How much sparge and how much strike you had isn't important to these calculations. What matters is how much wort of what gravity you had at the end. You can measure this either pre-boil or post-boil, but the question is always how much sugar went into your brew kettle. So you had 7.5 gallons of 1.043 wort in your kettle at the beginning of boil?

evwoller said:

I would have to disagree chemistry training has a lot to do with beer brewing. To me, this is just another water based extraction of plant tissue. To someone who has no experience at all this is borderline magic.

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I'm not saying that chemistry has nothing to do with beer brewing. I'm saying that being more knowledgeable or "better" at brewing does not get you higher efficiencies. How much sugar your system pulls out of the grain is a function of how much water you use and how much water you leave behind. A frat boy with a properly calibrated fly sparge system would get a higher efficiency than a PhD with a no sparge brew in a bag. It's just math.

evwoller said:

Doesn't the preboil volume take into consideration the lost water? its not like I am taking my preboil gravity and attributing it to the full amount of premash/sparge water.

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Still confused by what you're saying. Pre-boil volume will include the water that's lost to steam during the boil, but not the water that's trapped in the grain husk when you pull out your bag. Your pre-boil volume should be the volume of water that is in your kettle before you turn on your burner.

Exactly you were saying efficiency, assuming proper conversion, is a function of water lost. Water lost stemming from the impossible task of recovering all your water from the grain, and possibly 'dead space' in the MLT or some such.

Back to wheat for a second. Wheat causes stuck sparges in a MLT type system some times. Why is this? is it just a consistency of the soaked grain, does it ooze gelatinous stuff, tend to crush into flour?

Ideally I want to make this very... wheatie? but i have no experience with the characteristics of soaked wheat so I didn't want to just jump into some ridiculous grain bill that A, wouldn't properly convert due to a deficit of necessary enzymes, B, cause a giant goopy mess or whatever the hell causes those people to get stuck

On a side note, WILD STALLIONS RULE!! and san dimas california is about a stones throw away from where I now sit.

evwoller said:

How I calced 87% 10.5 lb grain bill into 4 gallons of water making a initial strike thickness of about 1.6 quarts per lb. Mash for about an hour to an hour and 15 minutes, the last 10 minutes being at 160. Dunk sparge in another 4 gallons of water for a further hour in the low 160's, pull, squeeze for all its worth and leave hanging above a bucket to catch residual. Pouring a light amount of fresh water over the grains to wring them again. Which left me with a wort of a little above 1.043 and a preboil volume of right around 7.5 gal. 100% efficiency should have been right at about 1.05, 43/50= 86

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I don't think 100% efficiency of those grains would equal 1.050. I think 100% would be closer to 1.076. 1.050 may be the expected gravity of the recipe but that number is based on the efficiency of the recipe designers system.

If you plug those grains into a program like Beersmith and set efficiency at 100% you'll see what I mean.

A 1.043 is more like 56%.

Actually those numbers may be a little higher than yours. I used a recipe for a Robust Porter w/11 lbs of grain. 7.5 gal preboil volume for a 5 gallon batch

Maybe I'm misunderstanding how to calculate potential yield from specific malts.

jetmac when you adjust to a into the fermentor volume of 5ish gallons you end up with a gravity of 1.07 something from having a preboil of 7.5ish gallons of 1.043. Is this probably where we are having an issue? I am pretty sure I checked my math like 3 times when i was waiting for hop additions and such.

Stuck sparges are mostly caused by the lack of husks on wheat, which is why you should add rice hulls.

skeezerpleezer said:

Stuck sparges are mostly caused by the lack of husks on wheat, which is why you should add rice hulls.

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So you are saying a lack of fiber, and therefore texture/rigidity causes collapse of the grain into something that is hard to pull water through? Thanks pal

evwoller said:

jetmac when you adjust to a into the fermentor volume of 5ish gallons you end up with a gravity of 1.07 something from having a preboil of 7.5ish gallons of 1.043. Is this probably where we are having an issue? I am pretty sure I checked my math like 3 times when i was waiting for hop additions and such.

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Oops! You're right. I'm getting old. Est Pre-boil gravity is 1.054

evwoller said:

So you are saying a lack of fiber, and therefore texture/rigidity causes collapse of the grain into something that is hard to pull water through? Thanks pal

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I think all of the fiber is still there, it's the destruction of the integrity of the structure that causes the collapse. Hence the rice hulls remaining intact will create support of pockets to allow liquid to "channel" through the grist.

The use of 6 row with wheat isn't about the enzymes, it's about getting more husk material to avoid a stuck sparge on a traditional mash tun. 6 row kernels are smaller so the percentage of the grain kernel that is husk is larger. Rice hulls added to the mash perform the same function. Neither is very critical for BIAB due to the mesh bag forming the filter. However, I have been led to believe that you shouldn't try 100% rye malt as it becomes really sticky and syrupy.

Barley and oats have hulls, wheat and rye do not.

Thanks RM-MN that is the answer i was looking for! I am currently thinking along these lines

4lbs domestic 2 row
4lbs some kind of darkened wheat
Hops I am probably looking at 3 oz but am not sure where to go with them, or what kind of schedule they should be on.
Lemon Zest (1 lemon?) and coriander (1 tsp) with less than 5 minutes to go
and then again in the fermentor 7 days before bottling

suggestions? comments?

Take a peek at the hops I used in this recipe and read the tasting notes at the top too. I know it isn't exactly what you want for flavor but it might give you a better idea about hop choices and amounts. http://hopville.com/recipe/1066896/american-pale-ale-recipes/citra-pale-ale

I brewed this again with the intention of getting more grapefruit and boy did I ever. http://hopville.com/recipe/1068411/american-pale-ale-recipes/citra-cascade-pale-ale

Again, these aren't what you are looking for but notice the hop amounts and hop schedule and think how this might fit into your beer. Notice the different bittering hops and how close the IBU ends up with each other. Your lemon zest and coriander might turn the first recipe I posted into a lemon flavor especially if you moved the Citra hop addition earlier in the boil so you don't get as much aroma from it and then forget the dry hopping and do the lemon zest instead.