my first Hefeweizen recipe/procedure

so i got my first kit of brewing equipment for christmas, and since then, i haven't been able to stop brewing beer. with the help of my buddy's extra carboys and fermentation buckets, i've been able to whip up 4 batches of beer so far. i'm absolutely in love with brewing beer.

with that being said, i've only been using the ingredient kits provided at my local home brewing store. these kits are mostly liquid malt extracts, grains for steeping, and a couple ounces of hop pellets. my last batch was an oatmeal stout that required a partial mash.

i want to start getting into more advanced brewing, and i'd like to eventually get to the point of all grain brewing. so feeling adventurous, i wrote up my own recipe for a hefeweizen based off other recipes i found online.

i'd appreciate some input on my recipe for my hefeweizen. i'm brewing in florida, so my winters are like northern summers, hence my brewing choice.

ingredients:

5 lbs wheat LME (briess)
2 lbs german pils (weyermann)
2 lbs german wheat (weyermann)
1 lb tupelo honey (yummmm)
1 oz hallertau whole hops

white labs hefeweizen yeast (wl300)


procedure:

1) begin with 5.5 gallons of water
2) bring water to 145 F
3) add my 4 lbs of grains (in grain bags) to water
4) mash for 60 mins keeping temp between 145 F and 155 F
5) after 60 minute mash, add 5 lbs of LME
6) bring to boil
7) add 1 oz bittering hops, boil for 50 minutes
8) after 50 minutes, add 1 lb tupelo honey
9) boil wort with honey for another 10 minutes
10) cool wort
11) pitch yeast

based off what i read, i'm predicting a ~1.050 beginning gravity.

any input would be appreciated! thanks a lot guys, and i apologize if my lingo comes off too "noobish"...just trying to get into the brewing game!

I noticed 2 things that I would change...

Steps
4) mash for 20 mins keeping temp between 145 F and 155 F
5) after 20 minute mash, remove grain bag.. add 5 lbs of LME.

You wanna remove the grain bag within 30 mins of ~150 F and before water reaches 180 F. Otherwise the husks of the grain can impart flavors of their tannins into the brew, creating a stringent flavor. Try to avoid squeezing your grain bag also, if you must, pour boiling water over your bag when removing it instead. Looks pretty good though!

That's an awful lot of water to mash in for 4 lbs grain. I would recommend something like 1.25 qt per lb (so 5 qts), at 30-60 min to get conversion. You'll have to heat your water to higher than your target temp because adding the grains will bring it down. To sparge you can either rinse the grain with 168 degree water or dunk it into a second pot, then combine the two worts, and proceed with your steps.

There's a lot of debate on whether sqeezing the bag really releases tannins, a lot of BIAB brewers say it's not a problem.

chickypad said:

That's an awful lot of water to mash in for 4 lbs grain. I would recommend something like 1.25 qt per lb (so 5 qts), at 30-60 min to get conversion. You'll have to heat your water to higher than your target temp because adding the grains will bring it down. To sparge you can either rinse the grain with 168 degree water or dunk it into a second pot, then combine the two worts, and proceed with your steps.

There's a lot of debate on whether sqeezing the bag really releases tannins, a lot of BIAB brewers say it's not a problem.

Click to expand...

This is good advice. I would spend some time looking into partial mash techniques.

If it were me, here is what I would do. I would use this calculator to calculate the temperature you want to mash at (TastyBrew.com | Homebrewing Calculators | Infusion Calculator). Assuming your grains are 70 degrees before you mash with them, you'll want to heat 5 qts (1.25 gts per lb of grain) of water up to about 162-163 degrees and then add your grains. This will bring your mash temp to around 150. I assumed a mash temp of 150 since your recipe called for steeping between 145 - 155. I would recommend mashing for 60 minutes total. If you are doing this on the stove top you can use the burner to raise your temps if they get to low during the mash. I would recommend wrapping the wrapping the pot with a towel. The towel will act like insulation and stabilize your mash temperature. Just make sure the burner is off. hehe

After you mash your grains, you will want to rinse them with about 0.5 gallons of water per pound of grain (2 gallon total in your case). You want this water to be about 168 degrees. You'll want to do this in a separate pot like chickypad suggested.

Other than your steeping schedule. THat looks like a solid hefe recipe. Just a bit of warning, that yeast can smell a little intense when it's fermenting, but it's nothing to worry about. It produces the traditional hefe smells and flavors (bananas and cloves).

One other thing I noticed, you said your estimated OG is 1.050 but I think you may be calculating that as if you were not doing partial mash. I get the following:
1.036 from 5lb LME in 5 gallons
-1lb honey is approx 40 pts / 5gal = 8ppg. So we're up to 1.044 without the grains.
- you should get about 89 more gravity pts from the 4 lb mash (even if only estimating 60% efficiency). 89/5 = about 18. So OG then would be about 1.062.

I plugged into brew software just to check - it gives 1.062 for partial mash vs. 1.048 for extract with steeping. So to stay to style you might want to go down on your LME. I don't think you will have trouble hitting 60% , when I used to do partial mashes with this bag in the pot technique I could routinely hit 70% efficiency.

cheers and good luck with your brew!

If you don't sparge you can mash as thin as 3-3.5 qt/lb. You should get well over 70% with that ratio and a half decent crush. An hour at 150 should be enough. You should slowly warm it up after the hour to 170 to mash out. That can finish conversion better.

A thin mash is traditional in German brewing because it works better with their decoction methods. They use more around 2 qt/lb (and then sparge). At 2 qt/lb the runnings should be around 1.060, at 3 qt/lb it's around 1.043 if you get good conversion.