Belgian Wheat Wine?

Am I crazy or does this sound delicious. Basically a wheat wine fermented with a belgian yeast. What yeast would you recommend? I was thinking a mix of wlp530 and wlp510, prob 4 vials for this 15g batch with a big ole starter.

15g batch
80% efficiency
OG - 1.113
FG - 1.026
SRM - 12
ABV - 11.3%
IBU - 78.5

26.5# Wheat Malt
26.5# 2 Row
2# Belgian Amber Candi Sugar

FWH - 2oz Nelson Sauvin
60min - 5oz Nelson Sauvin
15min - 2oz Nelson Sauvin

Should i maybe up the ibu's because of the high gravity?

What's the reason for carapils AND sugar?

I was thinking the cara for head retention and body, and the sugar to bump the gravity a bit. I have exactly 26.5lb of wheat left over and wanted to keep it 50/50 rather than adding more 2row. Would u cut the cara out?

ktraver97ss said:

Would u cut the cara out?

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i would, with the size of the beer and all that wheat, body & head retention shouldnt be an issue

Well the carapils will add body but the sugar will thin the body.

That was kinda the thought to balance it out a bit.

ktraver97ss said:

I was thinking the cara for head retention and body, and the sugar to bump the gravity a bit. I have exactly 26.5lb of wheat left over and wanted to keep it 50/50 rather than adding more 2row. Would u cut the cara out?

Click to expand...

A beer at 1.113 SG will have plenty of body. Maybe too much if crystal malts are added. Almost 50% wheat will have plenty of head retention. I would keep the sugar and lose the c-pils. Too much body can make a beer appear sweet.

True, didnt even think of that, thanks. What do you think of those yeasts? Should I maybe do 2 belgian and 2 wlp007 too keep this from being too belgiany(new word i made up)?

I've done one Wheatwine and used the WLP007 but the Belgian yeast is intriguing. Only problem with mixing the two is it might be hard to duplicate later. One may over power the other. Might want to split the batch and try each one individually. You can always mix when done. A second option is to use a wheat yeast which will crap out early. Then pitch the Belgian or Dry English...

hmm.. plus the champagne yeast at bottling a 3 stage pitching could be interesting...

Although, what kind of benefit would there be to using the wheat yeast early? Do you think pitching the belgian/english after the gravity has dropped a bit will let it ferment down lower?

I bet wlp410 would be interesting, im not a bit fan of banana flavors that some of the hefe yeasts leave.

Gunna brew this one up this saturday. I changed the sugar to a soft brown candi to lower the srm a bit and threw a lb of abbey malt in there for ****s and giggles. Going to put it right on 2 yeast cakes of wlp002 from a 30g batch of brown ale, then up the temp to 70 after 7 days and pitch 2 vials of wlp530 and leave that to do its magic for at least 3 weeks. Any opinions on this plan?

15g batch
80% efficiency
OG - 1.107
FG - 1.025
SRM - 9
ABV - 11.1%
IBU - 80

26.5# Wheat Malt
26.5# 2 Row
2# Belgian Brown Soft Candi Sugar
1# Abbey malt

FWH - 2oz Nelson Sauvin
60min - 5oz Nelson Sauvin
15min - 2oz Nelson Sauvin

Sounds like a plan!

So this brew went well, mash only got stuck once and a little breaking up with the paddle took care of it. We had an OG of 1.099 and that thing fermented like crazy! Sounded like a 4 stroke motor sputtering away. After 5 days a pitched a vial of wlp530 in each fermentor which had about 8g in each. That blasted this baby down to 1.019 in less than 10 days. It tasted great too, very similar to Harvest Dance by Boulevard actually. Cant wait to get this carbed, so hard to be patient.

So, we bottled most of this, but a little bit in the keg was quite good flavor wise, but did not retain much of the Belgian yeast flavors. We overshot our mash temp as well, were planning on 152, but went up to 156 somehow and the unfermentable sugars made this beer super heavy bodied. Next time I plan on going for 150* and only using wlp530. So, basically this did not produce what I was looking for, but gave me a starting point to improve on.

Second issue, bottles are barely carbonated after a month at 68*. We used the normal amount of priming sugar, and even added a small amount of dry yeast to the bottling bucket since it was in the fermentor for a month and a half. We even ended up pulling more yeast than normal in to the bottling bucket because we were using a new technique to rack out of the sanke fermentors. There is enough yeast in the bottles to cake to the bottom and you can see it when giving the bottles a swirl. I moved them to a warmer spot in the house, around 70*, and am going to try to give a them a swirl now and then, but swirling 12g worth of bombers is a pain in the ass! Any ideas for me?

Might be too much alcohol for the yeast or the pH might be too low. About all you can do now is wait and see.