July 4th - Best Brew Day Yet

On Friday, I brewed my third batch - Jamil's Harold-Is-Weizen from Brewing Classic Styles. This is the first batch that I created a starter for, a 2L beast using about half a pound of pilsner DME and a tube of WLP300. This was my first full boil and I had a couple minor boilovers but nothing serious.

This is also the first time I got to use my new DIY cooling rig that I constructed from a 50' roll of 3/8" copper tubing from Home Depot, 10' of 3/8" tubing, a female hose fitting with barb, and hose clamps. I rolled a ~35' immersion chiller and a separate 15' pre-chiller but after some testing settled on using the pre-chiller as more of a post chiller to flow immersion-cooled wort through an ice bath to get it to ~60 degrees. Worked great...the immersion chiller took the wort to ~78 degrees in 20 minutes and the post-chiller cooled it to a solid 62 degrees in the time it took to siphon the wort through it into the carboy.



I also invested in a Johnson temperature controller and converted a small chest freezer that was barely used into my new fermentation chamber, holds temperature very nicely which is good because it's really expensive to keep a Tampa home at 62 degrees in July. Here's the brew about 36 hours into fermentation, looks strong and the freezer smells like banana bread. Overall, a great brew day!




Cheers!

looks GREAT! let us know how it tastes!

Nice setup, my 3rd brew i was still using my walmart ceramic pot and and didnt know what a chiller was...lol

Looks great!! Let us know how the banana/clove comes through. I'm really curious if the large starter will reduce the amount of banana/clove; this seemed to be the case in my American Wheat... but I used Wyeast 1010 AM Wheat yeast which is fairly neutral anyway.

Just brewed this recipe on Monday using wyeast 3068. I used a smaller (1 pint) starter & am holding the temp @ 61-63F. My OG was a good bit lower than I was expecting (1.036) but I figure I'll be drinking this by the liter come the dog days of August, so maybe smaller is better.

Prost!

Southwood said:

My OG was a good bit lower than I was expecting (1.036) but I figure I'll be drinking this by the liter come the dog days of August, so maybe smaller is better.

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That's pretty low, mine came in at 1.050. Fermentation seems to be winding down slowly, still has a nice krausen on top. The banana bread smell was knock you down strong for the first few days but seems to have settled down a bit now, smells really nice now - I'm hoping the flavor is more neutral than the early smell, if not...oh well, I like bananas too.

The smell will hit you hard during fermentation, but I think the cooler temps should keep the flavors balanced. I was nervous about going that cold, I had to keep my ferm fridge in the mid-50's to keep my fermenting wort reading 61-63. It's been cruising steadilly for 3 days now & is giving me those delicious bananna smells. Not sure why my OG was so low, I'm hoping it was just a bad reading (partial boil), but I'm sure it'll be delicious anyway.

Here's to Hefe!