Advice on Recipe - (dunkel/wheat/alt?)

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bernerbrau

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I'm not even finished with my first brew (it's in secondary now), and I'm already wanting to get started on my second. I'm just playing around right now and I'm not into particular styles yet, but this is supposed to be a hoppy dark wheat beer. I wanted to incorporate specialty grains and finings, and an alternate sugar. Anyway I've come up with the following recipe from ingredients available from my local homebrew supply store:

Yield: 5 Gallons

American Ale Yeast (packaged or saved?)

3lb Briess Amber DME
3lb Briess Wheat DME (60% Wheat)
1lb Briess Crystal Malt (80)
1/2 cup Sugar in the Raw (wort)

1oz. Centennial Pellet @ 60
1oz. Centennial Pellet @ 45
1oz. Cascade Leaf @ 15
1tsp Irish Moss @ 15
1oz. Cascade Leaf (Dry hop, added during secondary)

3/4c Corn sugar (bottling)

1 week in primary, 2 in secondary, 10 days bottle-conditioning

Any advice on execution, caveats or mods to the recipe? Tips, things to keep in mind? I'm a sponge. Any new information or anecdotes are helpful to me.
 
I like the idea of the use of 80 Crystal. That will bring darkness and flavor. The Dark DME will also impart a dark color, so I think you are in the right Lovibond rating for this dunkel. I see you are using 1056. Do you have any American Wheat Yeast? If so it may get you more in line in the flavoring categorey of wheat. 1056 is an awesome all arounder and you will be fine if you don't have any wheat yeast.

You could also substitute 80* Crystal with "breadlike" malts instead. Looks like a good recipe and should produce a fantastic brew.

- WW
 
1pkg American Ale Yeast + 1 container stored yeast from my first brew
Looks like an intriguing brew. I've never tried a combination of wheat + lots of hops so it'll be good to hear how it comes out. The only thing I can think of is that you might be better just going with a single yeast. If you put two kinds of yeast in the wort, they'll essentially be competing against each other to reproduce - I believe what you'll find is that you'll just get the characteristics of whichever yeast wins out. If you want to get a blend of different yeast-led flavors, the way to do it would be to make two batches and blend them.

Of those two yeasts you mention, I'd go with the American Ale yeast, as my guess (based on my own practices) is that a new lot of yeast is likely to be more sanitary than a batch I've saved from last time.

Good luck with it. Let us know how you get on.
 
The only thing I can think of is that you might be better just going with a single yeast.

It's the same yeast strain, using the leftover from my previous batch is to try and kick-start the fermentation.
 
Personally, I'd stick with light DME as you'll get plenty of color from the Crystal 80. The dark DME won't necessarily make it a bad beer, but it will make it extremely dark. I like the hop schedule.
 
I ran the ingredients through QBrew, and this is the estimate I came up with:

Color: 16 (a deep mahogany according to this)
Bitterness: 76 (like an imperial IPA)
ABV: 5.6% (decent strength)

Amber or light DME both take the color down to 15 -- is there any reason flavorwise to favor these over dark? Doubling the brown sugar would take ABV up to 6.1%, a nice strong beer, and illegal in Alabama.

Another worry is that the hops will overpower the wheat. I am a bit of a hophead but I'm trying to strike a balance. Will the wheat character come through even in a very bitter beer?
 
Doubling the brown sugar would take ABV up to 6.1%, a nice strong beer, and illegal in Alabama.

Using that much brown sugar in a 5 gallon batch could very well lead to cidery flavors and a thinner body, which you want to avoid. If you want to up the ABV, just use an extra pound of DME

76 IBUs is pretty high, but i still really like the hop combo. I've never brewed a wheat with that many IBUs so I can't say from experience if it will kill the wheat character, but I think it's worth trying
 
You're cramming too much into one brew. Do you want to accent the light flavor of wheat, or do you want a deep, malty beer? Do you want caramel/molasses sweetness from the brown sugar, or is the sugar just for gravity points? Are you aware of the off-flavor risk posed by using so much cane sugar? Do you want a malty German Dunkel style beer or a super-hopped American Amber/Alt style beer? Why saved yeast + new yeast?
 
You're cramming too much into one brew. Do you want to accent the light flavor of wheat, or do you want a deep, malty beer? Do you want caramel/molasses sweetness from the brown sugar, or is the sugar just for gravity points? Are you aware of the off-flavor risk posed by using so much cane sugar? Do you want a malty German Dunkel style beer or a super-hopped American Amber/Alt style beer? Why saved yeast + new yeast?

I was under the impression that the saved yeast could be used as a starter for the yeast prep; I wasn't sure that it could be used all on its own, which was why the new packet.

I had heard good things about using brown sugar in the wort, and I was hoping to subtly alter the flavor character, add color and tweak the ABV with it. Is 1 cup to 5 gallons considered high? Because I can tone it down further.

As far as my end goal I'm not trying to capture on a style; I'm just looking to discover how the interplay of flavors in a hopped-up dark wheat ale will turn out. Worst case, I try a different recipe. Even if it's not what I expect, I doubt it will be undrinkable.
 
UPDATE: I tinkered with the ingredients a bit. I reduced the amount of brown sugar to mitigate the risk of off flavors, and opted for turbinado (raw) sugar since it's a bit less "refined" than brown sugar, and I went to an Amber DME to keep the color within normal IIPA limits. Since c.n.budz is raving about the hop schedule I'm gonna stick to it.

I think I'm going to go with a low boil volume and top up with water in the fermenter to avoid the cataclysmic boil-over I had with my first batch. I may yet decide to use an American Wheat Yeast instead to encourage the wheat characteristics. I know a lot of different flavors are hard to balance just right.
 
I may yet decide to use an American Wheat Yeast instead to encourage the wheat characteristics. I know a lot of different flavors are hard to balance just right.
Sounds good. If you use a wheat yeast, I'd avoid the Fermentis 06 dry yeast. It's not bad, per se, but it's boring as hell and contributes very little. Any other wheat yeast would, I'm sure, be fine.
 
If I were you I would try to keep this on the "safe" side and give it a nice balance between the malt and hops.

One rule of thumb for a balanced beer is to have your OG:IBU ratio at about 2. ie If your og is 1.050 the IBUs should be close to 25. Technically it should be the (OG-1):IBU ratio I guess :)

If you want to keep the recipe at 3lbs DME and 3lbs Wheat DME, plus 1 lb of sugar - that would give an O.G. of 1.061. A balanced beer would want IBUs of about 30.

You can achieve this by reducing the 60 minute addition to 0.5 oz of Centennial and the 45 mins addition to 0.25 oz Centennial. Keep your 15 and dry hops as is.

While these numbers look good - you may get too much of a citrusy flavor from the centennial and cascades. You may be into that, but you might prefer a less citrusy (more neutral) bittering hop like Horizon or Galena at 13% each. You could also use much less of these hops - an added bonus at today's prices.

If you chose to do so, between 0.5 and 0.75 ounces of Galena/Horizon at 13% AA @ 60 minutes instead of the Centennial additions at 60 and 45 mins would give you IBUs ranging from between 27 (0.5 oz) to 35 (0.75 oz).

HTH!
 
OK, tested this one out last night for my second batch. Ended up going with 1/4c of turbinado sugar, so if I'm lucky I might get a hint of molasses in the final brew. The homebrew supply was all out of Centennial and could only sell me an ounce of cascade, so I modified the hop schedule:

1oz Nugget@60
1oz Palisade@15
1oz Cascade (dry)

At 6:30 PM I steeped the 1lb. crystal 80 at 155F for an hour, then I started the boil, adding the DME and sugar, then returning to a boil at 7:55 PM. After adding the DME and sugar, despite using far less water this time, I boiled over AGAIN, losing some of that precious liquid, but thankfully this was probably the worst of my concerns last night. I ended up with about 2.5 gallons of wort, and after topping off I have somewhere between 4 and 5 gallons in the carboy.

During the boil I rehydrated the yeast (I went with Safale WB-06) in a sealed mason jar half-full with preboiled, chilled water, and added a tablespoon of the wheat DME to get the boys going. By the time the boil finished there was a beautiful, thick foamy head in the jar that just wasn't there on my yeast prep last time. I finished the wort chill at 9:30PM and began funneling the wort into the 6.5gal glass carboy -- this is where I hit the second snag, because even though my funnel has a built-in strainer, the combination of the sticky wheat malt, whole hops, and some leftover grains from steeping the crystal malt clogged up the operation, preventing the wort from flowing into the carboy.

I quick-sanitized a teaspoon in some Star-san (1-minute soak; shake dry) and started stirring the funnel to release the solids, which sped up the funneling process noticeably, but still took some concentration and caused the wort to sud up considerably. I topped off with preboiled, cooled water then pitched the yeast at 9:45PM. I stuck the airlock in and realized it was only half-full, so I decided to use a smaller, unsanitized funnel to put a tiny amount of the preboiled water into it to top it off, but some of it dripped through into the wort, so there may be a potential contamination from the airlock water.

Last night there wasn't nearly as pungent a malt smell as there was last time. This morning everything was working well; a nice thick krausen was there, the wort was actively churning, and giant gas bubbles were percolating through the water in the airlock.

I think I did better overall on sanitation but the wort this time around presented some new challenges. I'm thinking a false bottom for my brewpot next time may help my funneling issues.
 
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