Hey,
I brewed my first beer ever on Dec. 2nd and after bottle conditioning/carbing for about 2 weeks, im wondering how i can make it better next time.
recipe: 6 lbs. rahr 2-row, 4 lbs. white wheat, 1oz Northern Brewer hops at 60 min. (the german hefeweizen kit from morebeer)
Mashed at 151 deg. for 60 minutes, fly sparged with 170 deg water for like 45 mins, boiled wort for 60 minutes. Cooled with an immersion chiller down to like 76 or 78 deg. then just pitched one vial of WLP300 into a 6.5 gal. plastic carboy. Here's the first thing that went wrong: my final volume was not the intended 5.5 gallons but more like 4 because the kettle i used had a very wide surface area and i lost a lot of beer to trub (after cooling the wort i dumped it back into my cleaned/sanitized cooler mash tun and transferred the wort through plastic tubing to my carboy). OG was 1.054, efficiency was in the 70s. Not bad for a first timer!
after like 10 hours i had signs of fermentation and after like 24 hours the whole thing went crazy and i had a blow off. not gonna lie, that was actually a relief to see. that yeast went nuts. anyways, the carboy was in a dark closet that no one uses at 59-62 deg. for 3 weeks. I took samples a few times and the fermentation came to 1.020 pretty soon (1 week) but after that it chugged slowly to get to 1.012, where it stopped. The smell and the color of the samples were EXACTLY what i wanted: Weihenstephaner clone-esque. The taste...eh. it tasted like a flat, slightly sweeter Coors or something. My notes after 8 days say "Like a flat, watery Hefeweizen/Coors hybrid. Hefeweizen taste comes through in the beginning, fades to sweetness."
Anyways, i didn't stress it then. After 3 weeks, I cleaned/sanitized the hell out of some bottles and went to work. i made a bottling bucket out of a Home Depot bucket and some plastic/brass fittings (cost too much, i'll buy a real bottling bucket next time but i had to go with that in a pinch cause i wanted the beer to be "ready" for my bday that was a week away). I had an awful time starting the siphon due to my small volume of beer (less than 4 gallons in a 6.5 gallon carboy). I used one of those you blow into and my friend advised me to slow down a few times cause he thought i'd pass out. So there's suspect #1 for why the beer tastes not so true to style. Suspect 2 is me dipping a paper towel sheet into the bottling bucket full of beer for a second. Why? cause im an idiot. Suspect 3 is not enough time in the bottle, which is what I imagine a bunch of people reading this have already decided is the culprit.
So how does it taste? Still more like a Coors/Paulaner hybrid. Im getting the sweetness that I taste in beers like Paulaner HW, but that FANTASTIC yeast character is not quite there. When i pour slowly, the beer comes out looking great, like a true HW (might post a pic tomorrow), and the head retention is superb. But that damn yeast character is just missing, even when i pour the last bit out of the bottle with all the settled yeast and who knows what else (paper towel).
What do you think I should change to get my beer to taste more like a Paulaner or a Weihenstephaner?
-Edin
I brewed my first beer ever on Dec. 2nd and after bottle conditioning/carbing for about 2 weeks, im wondering how i can make it better next time.
recipe: 6 lbs. rahr 2-row, 4 lbs. white wheat, 1oz Northern Brewer hops at 60 min. (the german hefeweizen kit from morebeer)
Mashed at 151 deg. for 60 minutes, fly sparged with 170 deg water for like 45 mins, boiled wort for 60 minutes. Cooled with an immersion chiller down to like 76 or 78 deg. then just pitched one vial of WLP300 into a 6.5 gal. plastic carboy. Here's the first thing that went wrong: my final volume was not the intended 5.5 gallons but more like 4 because the kettle i used had a very wide surface area and i lost a lot of beer to trub (after cooling the wort i dumped it back into my cleaned/sanitized cooler mash tun and transferred the wort through plastic tubing to my carboy). OG was 1.054, efficiency was in the 70s. Not bad for a first timer!
after like 10 hours i had signs of fermentation and after like 24 hours the whole thing went crazy and i had a blow off. not gonna lie, that was actually a relief to see. that yeast went nuts. anyways, the carboy was in a dark closet that no one uses at 59-62 deg. for 3 weeks. I took samples a few times and the fermentation came to 1.020 pretty soon (1 week) but after that it chugged slowly to get to 1.012, where it stopped. The smell and the color of the samples were EXACTLY what i wanted: Weihenstephaner clone-esque. The taste...eh. it tasted like a flat, slightly sweeter Coors or something. My notes after 8 days say "Like a flat, watery Hefeweizen/Coors hybrid. Hefeweizen taste comes through in the beginning, fades to sweetness."
Anyways, i didn't stress it then. After 3 weeks, I cleaned/sanitized the hell out of some bottles and went to work. i made a bottling bucket out of a Home Depot bucket and some plastic/brass fittings (cost too much, i'll buy a real bottling bucket next time but i had to go with that in a pinch cause i wanted the beer to be "ready" for my bday that was a week away). I had an awful time starting the siphon due to my small volume of beer (less than 4 gallons in a 6.5 gallon carboy). I used one of those you blow into and my friend advised me to slow down a few times cause he thought i'd pass out. So there's suspect #1 for why the beer tastes not so true to style. Suspect 2 is me dipping a paper towel sheet into the bottling bucket full of beer for a second. Why? cause im an idiot. Suspect 3 is not enough time in the bottle, which is what I imagine a bunch of people reading this have already decided is the culprit.
So how does it taste? Still more like a Coors/Paulaner hybrid. Im getting the sweetness that I taste in beers like Paulaner HW, but that FANTASTIC yeast character is not quite there. When i pour slowly, the beer comes out looking great, like a true HW (might post a pic tomorrow), and the head retention is superb. But that damn yeast character is just missing, even when i pour the last bit out of the bottle with all the settled yeast and who knows what else (paper towel).
What do you think I should change to get my beer to taste more like a Paulaner or a Weihenstephaner?
-Edin