50/50 % wheat malt/AP flour beer

[del]

Here's a short write-up of an expirement I did to see if you can make a 100 % wheat beer with 50 % wheat flour. Short answer: yes! Details follow.

Since I'm in Sweden, I work in metric units. As a service to those loyal to King George, I've also translated it to British Empire Units

Recipe

Batch size: 10 l / 2.65 gal.
Boil size: 13.7 l / 3.62 gal.
Boil time: 45 min.
OG / FG / ABV: 1.043 / 1.010 / 4.7 %.
Bitterness: 10-11 IBU.

Grain bill
900 g / 2 lbs. wheat malt
900 g / 2 lbs. wheat flour (cake flour)

I did this BIAB, it might be necessary to add rice hulls for traditional AG setups.

Single infusion mash at 65-66 °C / 149-151 °F for 60 min. Initial water amount was 13.7 l / 3.62 gal. and only a negligible amount was absorbed by the grain.


Hops
5 g / 0.18 oz Fuggles (45 min)
5 g / 0.18 oz Cascade (15 min)

Boiled for 45 minutes with Fuggles for bittering and a small amount of Cascade for aroma. This should give 10-11 IBU.

After boiling, I poured the full amount into a plastic fermenter and let it cool over night. The next morning, the amount was measured to roughly 10.5 l / 2.77 gal. OG was 1.043.

To start the fermentation off, I scooped about 500 ml / 0.5 quarts of fermenting beer from a Belgian tripel I had going. The yeast strain is Wyeast 1214 (Belgian Ale). Due to lacking temperature control facilities, the fermentation was left to its own devices in a room with an ambient temperature of roughly 22 °C / 71 °F, i.e. quite warm.

Primary fermentation was done after 4 days, FG 1.010. This gives an estimated ABV of 4.7 %.

I bottled this with priming sugar for about 2.7 volumes on day 6. Today was day 19, meaning that it's had 13 days on bottle. At bottling time, there was a massive amount of trub, I had to leave around 1.5 l of 10.5 l behind, which is 0.6 gal. out of 2.77 gal., or a loss of 14 % to trub, which had a thick porridge structure, due to containing all the flour used in the recipe.


How does it taste?
Yes, how indeed? Well, not bad actually. It has a pretty thick head with fine bubbles, a nice pale colour and very solid haze. It looks like witbier. When I poured the glass, a smell of leavened bread dough rose up, it smelled just like when I make pizza dough. Sniffing the beer gives bread dough and banana. The body of this beer is very light, and flavour has a slightly sour flavour like most wheat beers do, as well as a taste of bread dough. There's some fruit and banana, but subtle. There's also a very slight hop flavour in there. It's a very easy drinker, and refreshing. If I had a lawn, I'd be inclined to call it a lawnmower beer.

Would you do it again?
Probably not exactly like this. While nice, I think a little bit more malt would've been nice, so I'd probably make this again with 20 % barley or so.

Would I use wheat flour again? Yes, definitely. I'm really liking this bready flavour, and you sure can't beat wheat flour for price!

All in all, I think this was a fun experiment that turned out much better than expected. I'm keen to see how this beer developes over the next few weeks, as it's still quite young.

Oh, and some pictures:

 

[IslandLizard]

Great experiment and the beer looks really nice!

From a cost perspective, wheat flour is probably as cheap as it gets. [EDIT] You must have gotten some decent conversion from it, given your OG of 1.043. How did your mash turn out? Like a thin dough probably, and how did you lauter it?

I guess you could use wheat flakes instead of flour, or 80-100% Wheat malt, with the rest in flakes or flour.
The yeast has a lot to do with the flavor produced. And you added 5% tripel, which you can probably taste.

On a side note, I didn't know there was a Cape Town in Sweden. Then again, many years ago some marketer claimed that the best coffee comes from "Sweden" (Gevalia).

 

[del]

Hi, thanks!

I'm doing BIAB, so I mash in the full volume, which made a mash like a very thin porridge. It also means there's no risk of stuck sparges, you just lift the bag up and the wort/batter flows off.

Conversion was about 80 % according to Beersmith, but that's based on an estimated pre-boil SG, since I didn't do a reading there. The total efficiency is quoted as 87.8 %... can't complain about that!

Wheat flakes would surely work, but the idea here was to see if I could use just plain old flour as unmalted wheat. I don't think I'd have tried it if I weren't doing BIAB. I quite liked the doughy flavours, so I think I'll make my next wheat beer with a high amount of unmalted wheat still.

I'm guessing the banana and maybe spicy notes are from the yeast, especially with the high fermentation temperature. The sour touch seems to me to be characteristic of wheat beers, and the bread dough flavour seems like it would be the flour.

You have a very good point about having blended with 5 % tripel, that is actually not an unsignificant amount. Will try with a cleaner culture next time.

Nice catch about Cape Town! I actually did live there for a couple of years, back when I created this account . I'm back in Stockholm now, but I sure do miss the mountains of the Cape sometimes. There is a beer connection too, as some Swedish folks are involved in one of the CT craft breweries (Cape Brewing Co., if I'm not mistaken).

You can get a really good cup of coffee here, but I prefer Zoega's myself

 

[IslandLizard]

I like experimenting. There has to be one recipe yet I've not tweaked or injected one way or another. There is a recent thread where someone used bread yeast and flour IIRC. Finding threads here is almost impossible. Actually typing in a query into Google PLUS homebrewtalk gives the best results. Forget the search engine here.

BIAB is your friend there. I can see how both mash techniques (conventional and bag) can coexist for the right effect. That thin dough would never work in a cooler with a manifold, no matter how many pounds of rice hulls you add. You'd be straining it through a voile curtain in the end.

Maybe using a witbier yeast at a lower temperature will give you a purer wheat beer fermentation. Not necessarily better. That slight sourness helps with the perceived flavor, in my opinion. Hard to imagine a good wheat beer being really sweet and without esters.

I'm wishing good luck and fortune to those craft breweries in CT. Although it must be an uphill battle to stay afloat, at the same time it's a no-brainer for those few with an acquired beer taste. SABMiller has a large settlement there, and AB Inbev is making a move to absorb them someday. I dread the day everyone wakes up to the travesty of iBeer.

I've heard of Zoega, but never had it. Gevalia is aggressively being marketed here in the US, starting maybe 30 years ago. I hope people realize that Sweden grows coffee as much as Belgium grows cocoa. We have Starbucks and lots of smaller, yet excellent coffee roasters. But most folks here don't drink those either. They buy coarse ground coffee in cans...

 

[del]

Yeah, the forum's own search is hopeless, but if you're on a subforum and use the search box in the top, then you get an embedded google search, which actually helps... curious that it's not there on the front page though.

I heard that American wheat beer is frequently made with a cleaner yeast, but I've never had any. I first learned about wheat beer when I drank Bavarian Hefe-Weissbier in Munich, so it seems natural to me with the banana ester flavours, I think the yeast I used did a great job, especially with the high temperature of the fermentation.

Certainly the beer culture in SA is mostly about mass produced lagers... and Castle Lite is a favourite among many. If you've got a sophisticated palate, you might pick up Windhoek or Hansa imports from Namibia. Not that there's anything wrong with a cold lager in the sun when you're braaing (grilling).

The craft beer scene in SA is growing though, there's definitely a few good places in CT, and I recall stopping at a little restaurant and brewery somewhere on the road between Joburg and the Kruger park.

Here in Sweden there's loads of small breweries these days and a good selection of American and British beers. Brewdog opened a pub in central Stockholm, and that place is bustling.

I had no idea that Gevalia was being marketed in America, that is funny. I mean, there certainly are enough good suppliers of coffee in the US that you don't need to import the middle-range Swedish brands. Curious world.

 

[IslandLizard]

Oh, the searches here drive me nuts. The very, very bottom of each page lists "similar threads." I get more out of those than any searches here. As I said I still prefer using Google directly together with the "homebrewtalk" restrictor. At least I can browse the results in an intelligent way.

Here is the link to that thread I mentioned where the guy used bread yeast and pancake mix.

The part that puzzles me when you use flour, don't you get an awful amount of flour in your wort? Or does it all get converted to sugar very efficiently?

Wheat yeasts all seem to bring out banana aromas and flavor, as well as a mix of other esters and phenolics we tend to appreciate. What do you consider a really a clean fermenting American wheat yeast?

Yeah, quite the irony to market some mediocre coffee or other mediocre domestic products elsewhere. In the commercials they get a guy with a typical foreign accent (not unlike my own) to sell the warez. Seems to work .

Here's another example. I lived in the Netherlands my first 30 years, and none of the top brands of Dutch vodka are to be found here. Instead, a brand named "Ketel 1" is being marketed here in the US. There's a story on the back as to how the name became...Truly, I've never heard of it or seen it before. Same for this new Dutch "Voxx" vodka. Fancy tall dimpled bottles that won't fit in just any cabinet. It's pretty decent actually. None of these are rebranded from what I can tell. I also found a Swedish import vodka here called "Svedka." How does that stack up to what's available in your country? It's actually quite smooth from what I remember, with a hint of peppermint perhaps. Do they still tax liquor to death there?

 

[del]

The pancake mix experiment is maybe a tad more experimental than I feel like being at this point... quite curious to hear how it turned out though. The spirit of adventure is clearly alive on this forum!

The conversion of starch went very very well, but there was certainly a lot of flour making its way into the wort, I suppose it's wheat protein to a large degree. I dumped it all into my fermenter, and it settled to a very thick layer of trub that I left behind when bottling. There still quite a bit of it in the beer, since it came out with a solid haze when pouring, but from what I read in Hieronymus's "Brewing with Wheat", this is actually a desirable feature of a witbier. I do think you'd struggle to create a clear beer with this method.

The mention of cleaner yeast was something I think I read in that book, that some American brewers ferment wheat beers with regular ale yeast, in order to reduce the banana/clove profile. I have no experience with those beers myself, so I can't say much more than that.

I'd never heard of Svedka, but Wikipedia says it won prices and everything. When I think of Swedish vodka, Absolut comes first to mind, and then the products sold under the more traditional names of "brännvin" (related in name, but not raw materials, to brandewijn) and "akvavit". I usually have some of the flavoured spirits for christmas and midsummer, and of course for crayfish season.

Alcohol is most definitely taxed high here. The tax on a regular 40 % ABV bottle of vodka (700 ml size) would be $22. Consequently, I drink single malt... it's only twice the price of vodka!

 

[z-bob]

I just found this thread; I'm planning to make a witbier soon, using about 65% barley malt and 35% unmalted wheat, and am planning to use all-purpose flour for at least some of the wheat (probably all of it.) I was not sure if AP flour would have any character, or if I needed to use at least some bulgur or whole wheat flour for flavor. Your post confirms that white flour will work.

I used 10% flour in a ESB last year, and even tho' wheat starch is supposed to gel at mashing temperatures, I got pretty low efficiency. So I'm going to fully cook the flour in most of the mash water this time; add a little cold water to drop the temperature before I add the malt. I need to do a test boil of about 4 ounces of flour in a quart of water to see just how thick and goopy it is...

I would never try this if I wasn't doing BIAB. I'll be using T-58 yeast, Willamette hops, and coriander and bitter orange for flavoring. I hope to end up with something resembling Hoegaarden, but as long as it's drinkable I'll be happy