First Wheat brew and bottling

[Lando]

I brewed up my first batch of wheat beer last night from a kit. The carboy thermometer is reading about 74 F right now and it was going pretty good 10 hours after pitching.
I plan on leaving this in primary for a seven-ten days or so and going straight from primary to bottle. I think i prefer it to be cloudy when poured.

After searching around I am still a bit confused.
Wheat beer doesn't get better with age from what I have read, but do I still need to bottle condition it for 7-14 days? ....and then consume ASAP while it is still good?

 

[DuckAssassin]

Well, it needs to be in the bottle at least long enough to carbonate. Which usually means a minimum of 2 weeks. I think people say that wheat beers need to be drank young, but I think you can take that a bit too extreme. I would still wait three weeks before I started moving them to the fridge, but taste one at a week and one at two weeks and see how it is going.

 

[TheTower]

It needs to carbonate in the bottle, at least three weeks. Then drink up!

 

[Dougan]

It might be a good idea to try and drop your fermentation temperature by 10 degrees or so. I guess I don't know what yeast strain you are using, but most ferment ideally below 70 degrees. Not going to ruin your beer if you don't, though.

Yes, you should still bottle condition for at least a week, probably two. It takes a couple weeks for the carbon dioxide released from the yeast to get infused in your beer and make it taste carbonated.

After that two weeks of bottle conditioning you should be good to go. The aging thing is more in reference to months-- "normal" brews would benefit from, say, 3-4 months of aging or more. Wheat beers really don't need that and after a couple months they'll start to decline a bit.

You may, depending on your style (hefeweizen or witbier are what I'm recommending here) want to forego your secondary (if you normally use one) and bottle immediately once you're 100% convinced after fermentation is complete. I've heard some people say they bottle after one week of fermentation on these beers. That might be too quick, but still-- a secondary is probably not necessary, and if you want to bottle after 2 weeks in primary that's probably not a bad idea for this specific beer.

You don't need to hurry to finish your beer before it "gets bad", but, no shame in drinking beer quickly.

 

[injen69]

I am doing a coopers wheat beer ... and added some honey as a lil extra
Was in the bucket for 5 days ... and been in the carboy for 1 week so far .... gonna wait another before bottling. I never knew that this beer could be bottled faster. Is this too long to wait?

 

[DuckAssassin]

I don't think that is too long at all. I recently made a Wit which I left in the primary for almost a month. As Dougan pointed out, fast is a relative term. 5 days is quick to move to the secondary.

Also, as a side note, I put half a pound of honey in what was already a fairly light Wit and it dried the heck out of it. It ended up being very popular with the light beer crowd (which was sort of what I was aiming for), but I don't really care for it as it has very little body.

 

[Arkador]

My heffewizen likes to take 2 weeks to fully carbonate in the bottle. It still comes out a bit cloudy.

My oktoberfest seems to carbonate within a week.

In both cases, I usually move 2 to the fridge after 2 weeks, and use that as a guage as to when i want to move the rest to the fridge.