Hey hefe-heads: yeast for specialty beer?

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goplayoutside

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So I was staring down a microscope at school this afternoon and inspiration struck: I should make some strong and dark wheat beer for this spring. So I came up with this for a partial mash orange-honey dark wheat, I am thinking a powerful beer with some malt backbone and also yeasty tartness:

Recipe Specifications
--------------------------
Batch Size: 3.00 gal
Boil Size: 2.75 gal
Estimated OG: 1.083 SG
Estimated Color: 21.1 SRM
Estimated IBU: 25.1 IBU
Brewhouse Efficiency: 75.00 %
Boil Time: 60 Minutes

Ingredients:
------------
Amount Item
3.00 lb Wheat Dry Extract (8.0 SRM)
1.50 lb Munich Malt (10.0 SRM)
1.00 lb Wheat Malt, Ger (2.0 SRM)
0.25 lb Cara-Pils/Dextrine (2.0 SRM)
0.25 lb Chocolate Wheat Malt (400.0 SRM)
1.00 oz Hallertauer Hersbrucker [4.00 %] (60 min)
0.25 oz Orange Peel, Bitter (Boil 5.0 min)
1.00 lb Honey (1.0 SRM)

So I am down to choosing a yeast. I think a hefe or similar yeast would be great -- some controlled clove would be fine in the beer but I am not really excited about banana, and I want the malts and orange to come through. My first choice would be WLP351 but it's the wrong time of year for that. So I am trying to decide between either a dry (WB-06/brewferrm blance, I love drys for the simplicity but am not sure these will give me the tartness I want), wyeast 3056 bavarian wheat (not sure what it will do banana-wise, though), and WLP 380 heffeweizen IV (maybe if I ferment it on the cool side the cloves will come out more subdued?)

Anyone w/ experience using these yeasts please chime in and let me know what you think!
 
go with the 380...it has very little banana and instead has nice apricot and clove notes. i use it in a lot of my dunkelweizens for that very reason.

the 3056 will have lots of banana.
 
And folks, I should add that any other comments on the recipe would also be great. It's totally off the top of my head.

And death, thanks for the yeast advice. Have you used the 380?
 
Thanks for the help. Am I correct in thinking that I can keep the ester profile somewhat under control by fermenting on the cool end (like 66 or so)? What temps do you ferment the 380 at?

I have been thinking about moving to partial mash so I can play with base malts more-- your method looks pretty easy but I am also strongly considering using a 2 gal cooler to do an infusion mash/batch sparge technique like this.

Anyways I would not be surprised if I had a PM setup rolling within a few weeks -- my next brew will be a hefeweizen because I have some german friends in town who keep complaining there is no good hefe for sale here (they are right - Montana and the rockies/northwest have some phenomenal craft breweries but it's hard to find good variety in imports). The hefe will probably be extract for simplicity's sake and because I don't have time to run around getting parts and experimenting before brew day (next weekend). But after that I am gonna go for it so I can get something in the fermenter before I leave town for the holidays (and bottle when I get back!)
 
i'd definitely keep it in the 60s, 66 would be fine. i usually throw them in my ale fermentation cabinet, which keeps an ambient 58°F. they usually ferment around 62°F.
 
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