American Wheat?

So, even though I've only got one All-Grain batch under my belt, I've decided to create my own simple recipe and keep brewing it over and over so that I can really nail my process down.

For my hops I went with Crystal and Cascade, as I'm looking for a citrusy flavor profile. I wanted to use the hops in 1oz increments because I don't have a scale to measure them. I also wanted to do later additions with more hops to get a more smooth bittering from them and not lose as much aroma.

My grain bill is pretty simple, just the base, wheat and some caramel 10L. Would the caramel complement the flavor or would it be an odd flavor to be in a wheat beer?

What do y'all think of the possibility of this being a decent recipe? I'm open to all sorts of criticism/suggestions!


Style: American Wheat or Rye Beer

Type: All Grain
Efficiency: 65.00 %


FG: 1.012
OG: 1.046
ABV: 4.57 %
IBU's: 20.87
Calories: 151.86
Color: 4.6 SRM

Boil Size: 8.01 Gals
Batch Size: 5.50 Gals

Preboil OG: 1.036
Boil Time: 60 minutes

Grains:
6.00 lbs. 2-Row Base Malt
5.00 lbs Pale What Malt
1.00 lbsCaramel 10L

Hops:
1.00 ozs 11.84Cascade20 mins @ 5.50%
2.00 ozs 9.02Crystal 10 mins @ 3.50%

Yeast:
Safale US-05

Mash Steps:
60 [email protected]°F

 

Crystal malts would taste fine in a wheat beer, but you might also look into using Vienna or Munich. Take a look at Thunderworm's American Wheat where he has something similar to what you're proposing here.

To get smooth bittering, you could try first-wort hopping. To get a little more flexibility, you might consider eyeballing 0.5 oz. increments - just halve the number of pellets.

Crystal is lovely, but won't give you all that much citrus. There's a long list of strongly citrus hops from which to choose, from blends like Falconer's Flight, to traditional pairings (e.g. Centennial and Cascade), to some of the more recent big citrus hops (e.g. Amarillo, Riwaka).

In the course of your investigations into your process, you could also look at varying the yeast. Several folks have used Koelsch yeast (Wyeast 2565 or WLP029) to get a subtle flavor profile in their wheats, and WB-06 gives an outstanding banana bread flavor.

This looks like a reasonable and rewarding exercise. Take copious notes. Enjoy.

 

That sounds like a good recipe. I would add a pound of Vienna personally... Bet yours is pretty tasty!


Sent from my iPhone using Home Brew

 

I went for it and tried it on Saturday and if the final product tastes anything like the wort, then it's going to be a spectacular brew! I really like the "spicy" flavor from the Crystal as it compliments the citrus from the cascade nicely.

My only "hiccup" is that in my equipment profile, I had 0.75 gallons of mash tub volume loss but I don't really have much dead space in my mashtun. That left my preboil volume at 8.75 gallons instead of 8.01 so to compensate I just did a 90 min boil to get my correct volume/gravity. I'm really glad that I took tons of notes like y'all suggested because it allowed my to figure out what was wrong before I ended up with a watery beer!

I've got it fermenting away at 63°F so I'll let y'all know how it turns out in a week or so!

 

Did your gravity come out properly? Boiling off 2.5 gallons in Alabama summer doesn't sound right at all. It sounds like you're counting grain absorption with that number which makes more sense.

 

I live in Oregon and get about 1 gallon boil off in an hour (I do 12gallon batches, so I start with 13.5 to also account for loss in my tubes, pumps, hop absorption and the stuff mixed with the trub that I don't want picked up by the dip tube (I whirlpool)) so to me 2.5 over 90min does seem a lot too, but he was in the boil at that time and came out high. How does that have to do I with grain absorption? Or did you mean hop absorption?

He may have had a higher target volume than 5.5gal?
Or he ended up getting better efficiency and he left some in the pot?

 

He mentioned .75 gallons of dead space in his mash tun. I thought maybe he was including losses at the mash tun with his boil off.

 

Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear enough. My pre-boil volume was supposed to be 8 gallons, with a 60 min boil and 1.5gal/hour of evaporation. That leaves me with 6.5gallons total wort at the end and that gets me 5.5 in the fermenter after trub loss, cooling shrinkage and other equipment loss.

Because iBrewMaster thought that had 0.75 gallons of mashtun dead space, my sparge water calculations were off by 0.75 gallons and I ended up with 8.75 gallons pre-boil. I just did a 90 min boil and it worked out perfectly to boil off that extra 0.75 gallons.

 

Speaking of that Alabama summer...it was miserably hot brewing on Saturday. The wind blowing the heat from the Cajun cooker right towards me didn't mix well with the +90° heat and 75% humidity...