Is my beer a Wit or a Hefeweizen?

Not sure if I'm posting this in the right spot, but anyways, I feel really dumb asking this question, but I figured, if I'm confused there's got to be someone else out there that is confused as well…I hope. The reason I need help in understanding the type of beer I'm brewing is, there is a homebrewing competition occurring soon and I'm thinking of entering it. As you may already be able to tell, this will be my first homebrewing competition. The category that I'm thinking of entering is Belgian and French Ale under the subcategory Wit.

Here in lies the question, I'm not sure if the current beer I'm fermenting is consider a Wit or a Hefeweizen. I'm fermenting a Lemon Coriander Weiss and going off the profile I've seen online for Wit's vs. Hefeweizen it seems the only real difference is the Wit uses coriander and some kind of citrus zest. If I'm wrong about this, let me know. So far my beer seems to be on track, because I used coriander and lemon zest towards the end of my boil, but the yeast that came with the kit that I used was White Labs WLP300 Hefeweizen Ale Yeast. This is the main reason why I'm unsure, because just because I used "Hefeweizen" yeast, does that mean my beer is a Hefeweizen and does not fit the category of Wit, or am I just completely missing the point?

Any help would be great and I would really appreciate it. Thanks.

To be considered a hefeweizen your grain bill (or extract bill) would have to have contained a significant percentage of wheat. Does your 'weiss' have 45-55% wheat in it?

The kit came with 6 lbs wheat LME, 3.3 lbs Pislen LME, and 8oz Carapils specialty grains.

Then you my friend have a bonafide hefeweizen!!

It depends on the target OG...45-55% wheat means that wheat malt makes up 45-55% of your OG, not the total grain weight.

Nevermind...just looking at those weights, wheat certainly would account for that high of a percentage.

SG 1.062–1. 066
FG 1.010–1. 012
IBUs ≈ 17

Darn, guess I can't enter it.

Just for my understanding, when you say the wheat malt makes up 45-55% of your OG, how do you figure that out.

I'll have to dig up the equation when I get home, but each grain has an expected extract efficiency, or its contribution to the OG of the beer. LME and DME is fairly consistent across the board, however, with higher extract potentials.

It really depends on what the hefe yeast does. The only way to know is to taste afterwards. If the citrus and coriander is noticeable but doesn't have a lot of banana and clove, it's a Wit. If the opposite, it's Hefe. If it's both, it's not worth entering. Citrus, banana and cloves doesn't seem like a good combo to me.

I always thought that a hefeweizen used hefeweizen yeast and had a significant portion of wheat malt. A wit uses a belgian yeast strain traditionally, but I suppose Blue Moon is not a wit then because it uses a neutral ale yeast. Now that I think about it a hefeweizen has prominent clove and banana flavors. And a wit shouldn't have those flavors. I agree with Bobby_M. Go look at the bjcp guidelines for the styles and let the flavor and aroma dictate which category your might fall into.

Isnt wheat LME closer to 50% wheat, witch would make it a bit low for a hefe?

Any chance of posting the equation or a link to where I can kind out more information about it. Thanks.

Ah, thanks for the reminder! I went out of town for Easter weekend and completely forgot..I will try to remember again tonight when I get home, but keep bugging me if not! FYI, it comes from Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels.

Looks like you've probably got about 30% wheat malt there (most wheat extract is in the 50:50 or 60:40 percent wheat range). Per BJCP guidelines a wit is traditionally 50% unmalted wheat while hefe should be at least 50% malted wheat.

That being said you can enter a beer in whatever category you want - the judges don't have your recipe. The problem is you will be graded according to how well it matches style. I think your biggest problem is not so much the exact percentage of wheat but that you might have competing flavors like Bobby pointed out. If you've got both zesty/citrus of a wit and the banana/clove of a hefe you're going to get dinged for one or the other. As others have said, see what it tastes like when it's done and maybe it will be obvious which category to pick. I'm betting it will be closer to a hefe.
Good luck!

Again, I got this info from Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels.

Ok...First you need to decide what you want your target OG to be. When you decide on that, multiply the number to the right of the decimal by your post boil batch size in gallons to get gravity units (GU). For example, a target OG of 1.050 with a 5 gal batch would be 50*5 = 250 GU. For a bigger beer, a target OG of, say, 1.105 would give 105*5 = 525 GU. Next, you need to decide what grains you are going to use, and what percentage of the total grain bill each will make up. Once you have done this, use the following equation to determine the weight of each grain:

ingredient gravity / (potential extract*mash efficiency)

Ingredient gravity is found by multiplying the ingredient's percent by the total gravity of the batch. Potential extract is a pre-determined value that depends from grain to grain, but a good source of this information can be found at https://www.homebrewtalk.com/wiki/index.php/Malts_Chart. The potential is in the second column, and you will need to convert it to gravity units in the same way as described above. For LME use 1.038, and for DME use 1.045.

Mash efficiency will be different for everyone's brewing system, so if you don't already know yours, start by using 65%, or 0.65 the first time you create a recipe. If you are figuring the amount of LME, DME, or other boil kettle addition, use 1 as the mash efficiency, since you aren't mashing those things. Next time you brew, you can determine the mash efficiency of your specific system to be used in future formulations. To do this, use

Efficiency = Total gravity of wort / Total potential gravity of grains.

To find total gravity of wort, take a hydrometer reading after collecting all of your mash/sparge runnings. Again, convert it to GU and multiply by the volume of your runnings in gallons. The total potential gravity of grains is a sum of the potential gravity of all the grains in the mash. To determine this, do the following for each grain in your mash: Multiply the weight of the grain by its extract potential in GU (from the chart I gave earlier). Then add all of the potentials of the grains and implement the efficiency equation.

When using this system, I consistently hit target OG's within +/-0.002. It works very well!

Screw it. Enter it into BOTH CATEGORIES. You probably won't score too well but the score sheets will give you great feedback, both on the "flaws" in your recipe, as well as anything they can pick out in your process. The feedback from experienced tasters is INVALUABLE!

Finally, if you like your wheat beer to have the grain bill of a hefe (because you can't do a proper wit with Extract) but the flavors of a Wit, then you brew that f*cker up 10 times a year and be proud! Competitions are wonderful for feedback, but they do NOT reward the 'best' beer. Just the ones that closest match their style.

Kinda like how Lassie would never have won the Westminster Dog Show, but who do you want nearby when you fall down the well? Some useless, prissy poodle, or the dog who'll go find Uncle Sam and bark at him until he understands you're stuck at ol' man Johnson's abandoned farm?