Advice on Wheat Beer

I'm a beginner brewer looking for some advice on a recipe. In the joy of Home Brewing book there is a recipe for a Weizenbier. It calls for
6.6#'s of 1/2 n 1/2 wheat/barley syrup
3/4 oz hallertauer hops
German Wheat beer yeast
3/4 cups DME

Just wondering if I should be adding any kind of grains to this recipe such as wheat malt or malted barley.
Seems like every other recipe I see has some kind of grains in it.
Any information would be helpful.
Thanks!

rbankert said:

I'm a beginner brewer looking for some advice on a recipe. In the joy of Home Brewing book there is a recipe for a Weizenbier. It calls for
6.6#'s of 1/2 n 1/2 wheat/barley syrup
3/4 oz hallertauer hops
German Wheat beer yeast
3/4 cups DME

Just wondering if I should be adding any kind of grains to this recipe such as wheat malt or malted barley.
Seems like every other recipe I see has some kind of grains in it.
Any information would be helpful.
Thanks!

Click to expand...

The Half and half is refering to a can of Wheat Malt Extract(liquid). The can has half wheat and half malt in it.
I got this information from my LHBS owner.

I'd go with Papazian's recipe if you have the means, he seems to know what he's talking about. That being said, use your imagination. Go to howtobrew.com and learn what all the specialty grains do, and use Papazian's recipe as a base and make what you feel like!

Try beerrecipes.org there are lot's of ideas there.

check out the BYO site like posted above and look at the grains and yeasts strains to get an idea. Another place I like to go for a bit of help on what I may want to use is http://hbd.org/recipator/

What he means is the 6.6 lbs refers to 2 - 3.3 lb cans of Wheat malt at 50/50 mixture (50 wheat/50 barley). Those cans are the grains...in a different medium - syrup.

Your recipe is already pre-determined by using the canned liquid malt.

The yeast I just used for my wheat is Hefeweizen ale yeast WLP300 and it worked out real good. Fermentated out wel and has the traditional wheat haze.

Whether you want to add grain to this batch in lieu of LME is up to you. The recipe you posted is a classic all-extract version. If you go partial grain or mini mash or all grain will be your decision, any will make a great beer.

Traditional hefeweizens are 50% malted wheat, 50% malted two row barley, with very light hopping and a special yeast to give the clove/banana esters. Ferment warm to bring out the esters if you like them.

Mike

That recipe looks pretty good...I recently did an all-grain hefe that was essentially the same...nothing more than pilsner malt and wheat with hallertau hops. You wouldn't need to steep any grains at all to do the same recipe with extract. I would go for 4.5 AAU's of the hops as opposed to a concrete weight measure as the alpha acids change from crop to crop. Just divide 4.5 by the alpha acid % of your hallertau hops and that will give you the ounces you need. That will basically be a clone of Weihenstephaner Hefeweizen.

The other thing I would note is that the 3/4c DME is not nearly enough to carbonate 5g in bottles. I would bump that to 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 c DME for priming as hefe's are generally very well carbonated.

thanks for all of the information, helped a lot. it's great to have a forum like this to find good information

OP - how did your wheat beer turn out? I've been thinking about trying the same recipe.

wheat beers are great for extract cause they are so simple. no specialty grains are needed to produce a nice wheat beer. i'm sure this recipe came out great.

I did the same recipe as AG recently using the 3068 Weihenstephan yeast. Cracked one open Friday (10 days in bottles) and it seems good, but obviously is still way too green and undercarbed to say for sure (I'm going for about 3.0 volumes carbonation). I think in another week to 10 days I'll know how I did. It's a simple recipe and if I wind up digging the finished product I'll knock out another one for summer and keg it.

I've also ingredients for an Aventinus clone, so hopefully I'll get that done and have a significantly more complex example of a wheat beer to compare with.

MMmmm cant wait to try it. I'm gonna try some fruit somewhere in the recipe. Maybe when going to secondary???

I dumped Oregon Cherry Purree in the secondary. Came out great!