My first AG turned to SH*T : (

Hello,


I brewed a raspberry wheat last month. It is my friends recipe that I have tried. It is a very good beer the recipe is as follows for a ten gallon batch:

20 lbs wheat mashed @ 150* for 1 hr
2 49 oz cans of OREGON puree added @ 40 min
1 oz cascade @ 55 min
1 oz cascade @ 59 min

I went to the LHBS to buy the ingredients. I was talking to the kid behind the counter and told him what I was making. He told me that for certain I was going ot have a stuck mash so he recommended I substitute 6 lbs of the wheat for domestic 2 row....I figured what the heck ( I think that was my first mistake)

I brewed it, chilled it, fermented it and let it sit in the primary for 3 weeks....longer than I planned to but I finally got around to racking it into the secondary.

Carbonated it after a month and sampled it.....right away I could taste a bit of sourness almost cidery aftertaste. I thought it was ok so did my neighbor.

Anyway....one keg sat in my kegerator and one on the garage fridge. I came home the 26th and tried it....it was worse!!! It tasted alot like cider and reaspberry....terrible actually.


The keg in the garage the same.....what happened...what did I do wrong?

I was overly careful with sanitation.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Joe

ILOVEBEER said:

he recommended I substitute 6 lbs of the wheat for domestic 2 row....I figured what the heck ( I think that was my first mistake)

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I won't pretend to know WHAT the problem is/was, but am pretty confident in saying it wasn't that. Making a beer with 100% wheat would be very unusual. Most "wheat" beers are 30-40% barley. As a manner of demonstrating the principle, extract sold as "wheat" is generally around 40-45% barley, so you can use just "wheat" extract to make a weizen.

I'd say part of the problem was putting rasberries in beer! But in all seriousness, for your first AG, why didn't you try something really simple and easy to execute? It seems to me that you went a bought a Ferrari for your first car, instead of a Corolla even though you had never driven a stickshift..... result... transmission burned out of a $100,000 car in 2 months.

When making a fruit based beer you generally add the fruit when racking to the secondary. I have never seen a recipe where it was added to the boil. Also when making a Wheat Beer it is 60%/40% wheat malt to 2 row +/- 5 0r so %. You also may want to think about using Rice Hulls next time you are using a large % of wheat. Wheat Malt has no husk so it needs a filter bed and RH are the fix for that.

A sourness that is increasing generally means an infection. Maybe not, but it sounds that way to me. It could just be the flavor of the wheat. Wheat does not taste the same as we normally think of when used in LARGE quantities. It could just be the wheat flavour that is overwhelming your palate... impossible to tell without tasting it.

What IBU was this thing estimated at? OG, FG?

i think somebody is yanking someones leg here....
firstly why 2 separate hop additions @ almost the same time.
2nd most fruit additions are done in the secondary or at least after main fermentation in order to preserve flavor.
3rd all wheat? yes it can and has been done but is a bit unusual

rj0715 said:

i think somebody is yanking someones leg here....
firstly why 2 separate hop additions @ almost the same time.
2nd most fruit additions are done in the secondary or at least after main fermentation in order to preserve flavor.
3rd all wheat? yes it can and has been done but is a bit unusual

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I did not notice that till just now. That is odd for hop additions. Perhaps it just sounds weird to me but I never thought of Cascade as a hop for a wheat beer. I generally use something along the lines of German hops. I do not want the hops to overpower a fruit beer.

Wheat beers are generally only 40-50% wheat malt and boiling the puree was a mistake.

That recipe does sound very suspect. Boiling Puree, 100% wheat, 59 minute and 55 minute 1oz cascade additions. I think you're friends played a joke on you.

Also, won't boiling the puree cause all sorts of crazy haze issues? Not sure if that causes any more than aesthetic problems, but maybe some pectic enzyme might help???

Also wheat beers usually go for a 90 min mash...

I don't think this one is your fault dude, you got a bunk recipe. You should check out the recipe section on this forum, most the recipes are tried and true. Good luck man!

I've brewed 100% wheat beers before and they are delicious. You do need to use hulls to prevent stuck sparges.

When it comes to fruits you don't want to boil them. It will set the pectins within them and gell up. Then you'll have all kinds of cloudy haze problems.

If the fruit is fresh you would want to pasturize it by either putting it in 170* water or wait until flameout of the boil, then add it and chill the wort. The problem is all the gunk trying to go through the screen/spigot. It is easier to add it to the primary after you pasturize it separately.

If you primary ferment the fruit, you'll get less flavor then if you waited for the fermentation to end, then add the pasturized/cooled fruit to the secondary fermenter.

Oregon puree is pasturized already, so all you really need to do is sanitize the can and opener real well then dump the puree into the secondary fermenter.

2 oz of cascade hops isn't that much with all that fruit and wheat in a 10 gallon batch. probably just a typo on the time. What was the yeast strain used?

BTW.. I think letting it sit so long in the primary may have played a roll in some off flavors

3 weeks is not too long in primary. ALL my beers get 3-4 weeks.

IrregularPulse said:

3 weeks is not too long in primary. ALL my beers get 3-4 weeks.

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On boiled fruit??

Boerderij_Kabouter said:

Also, won't boiling the puree cause all sorts of crazy haze issues? Not sure if that causes any more than aesthetic problems, but maybe some pectic enzyme might help???

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Of course, this is a wheat beer. So, haze might not be an issue in this case. I would think cooking/boiling the puree would probably also lead to a different flavor from the fruit.

Is this like one of those murder mystery stories but in the theme of a bad, really bad, beer recipe?

My first beer was a raspberry beer recipe that was just God awful too. Wrong on so many levels.

Hello,

I can assure you my buddy didn't play a joke on me

I have heard from several of you that boiling the puree is a bad idea....but that is what he told me to do.

The brew day went flawless for my first...that is why I am surprised it tasted the way it did. I went out of my way to overkill sanitize everything to avoid infections.

I don't think I will make this again.....I liked it when I first tried it, but since I started brewing and trying new beers, my tastes have changed.

I am unsure as to what happened. I wish I knew so I could avoid it next time. The crazy thing was when I had his, it was semi cloudy (like a heff), with a light hue of raspberry color. Mine was as dark as a sam adams with a raspberry hue to it and borderline acidic in taste.....WTF I said when I first looked at it.

What yeast strain did you use? How long did you brew from grain till glass? Some flavors take a while to mellow.

I used white labs american heff....2 of them for 10 gallons.

I wish the taste changed for the better and not for the worse

Total time from brew to glass was 30 days

What are you sanitizing with? I get a bit scared when I hear "overkill sanitize". Were you using a no rinse final rinse sanitizer? How did you use it? How did you clean before sanitizing?

First AG was a WHAT?????????

My first was a tried and true IPA.

Lol. I am sorry! I would do at least one middle of the road AG and see how that goes.

By doing some crazy fruit beer right off the bat, there is no way to pinpoint what was really wrong.

Was the OG taken?FG?

That might be a huge factor. If the wheat didn't convert (usually the first concern on an AG) that could be really bad.

The buddy you got the recipe from, does he brew it AG also? If not, perhaps it went south in the conversion.

However I agree with some of the other posts that it just doesn't look like that swuft of a recipe.

Yeah...he owns Sabco equipment and has been doing it for 5 years....

My OG was 1.040...My FG 1.010

I use StarSan...I wash wth dishsoap first (small amount) then rinse. On this batch I made themistake of final rinsing the StarSan out of the fermenter...Now I then sanitize with StarSan and drip dry...no final rinse with water.