Malt mix-up - what did I make?

[brianpablo]

So I set out yesterday to make a clone of Sierra Nevada's Old Chico Crystal Wheat - a fairly simple recipe based on what I could tell from their website. A nice summer drinkable thing bittered with Perle using Crystal for flavor and aroma, gravity of around 1.045, pitched with Safale 05.

The wort looked really dark, which surprised me given that the beer is quite light. Then I realized I had used Briess' Bavarian Wheat Extract rather "regular" wheat extract. The former is 65 pct wheat, as opposed to the 50-50 mix I thought I was getting. No worries as I'm sure I'll find folks to drink it, I myself am quite adept at "safe disposal" of brewing mistakes.

Just out of curiosity, what did I make? A dark wheat? A kinda-dunkel somethin' somethin'?

 

[unionrdr]

I brewed a Bavarian hefe with watermelon juice in it. Just gonna get it into the cooler to chill today. but it is a hair darker with a coral pink tinge to it from the watermelon. We'll see when it gets into a glass.

 

[sboyajian]

Still a wheat, just probably more on the German Wheat side than American Wheat.

I brewed a Bavarian hefe with watermelon juice in it. Just gonna get it into the cooler to chill today. but it is a hair darker with a coral pink tinge to it from the watermelon. We'll see when it gets into a glass.

I just did the same using 50/50 of Pilsen DME and White Wheat, WLP380 hefeweizen yeast and then once I got to FG I dumped in 5 cups of strained watermelon juice.

Mine is the same. It's very light with a beautiful pink/light red hue. Bottled it this weekend. Can't wait to try it out.

 

[brianpablo]

Thanks to everyone. Maybe I'll throw some watermelon in there!

 

[unionrdr]

I put the meat from one sugar baby watermelon in the blender on smoothie setting. Then strained twice with my fine mesh strainer. Got 5 3/4C of juice, used 3C in the wort at flame out. We'll see how it tastes after brew day later...

 

[IslandLizard]

I don't know about making all that watermelon wheat, it's nice to have a few bottles hanging around to brag with, but that flavor gets long in the tooth quickly. I usually experiment with a(n) (extra) gallon or so, but leave the main beer as intended.

 

[sboyajian]

To be honest I only made a watermelon wheat because I had some watermelons in the garden.

Honestly I would just leave yours as intended, or at most as said above, experiment with a 1 gallon batch with watermelon.

 

[zachattack]

Have you made a lighter wheat beer before? I don't think the darker color is due to the higher % of wheat in the extract. The trick to brewing a light-colored beer using extract is to add most of the extract as a late addition. Did you boil the extract for the entire 60 minutes?

 

[HerbieHowells]

To make dunkelweizen you typically add Munich and maybe some chocolate malt. I would agree with Zachattack that the color might have something to do with the amount of extract that you boiled for 60 minutes- look up late extract addition to see how you might get a lighter color in the future. (This is mostly an aesthetic issue- while you might have slightly caramelized the wort, it should still be fine). I would consider that before you consider another possibility: if you were using liquid extract, you might have gotten older or oxidized extract. If it came out of a large bulk bin at you LHBS or was a dusty can on a back shelf somewhere, it might have taken on oxygen and gotten darker. I've heard tales of people buying bargain bin Coopers light kits only to end up with a brown or darker beer.

(Edit to add: with the rare exception like Avery, most brewery websites won't list percentages on their beer descriptions. Sierra Nevada at least tells you the ingredients, but there is no way to know for sure from that site if they use 50-50 or some other proportion. Hell, for all we know, they might use 65-35!)

 

[brianpablo]

Truth is this is a one gallon recipe - I only boiled it half an hour! The IBUs came out OK that way and I was trying to save myself time in the kitchen (I'm traditionally an all-grain brewer but now that I've got two kids in the house I've switched to one-gallon extract brews that I can make after dinner). I think it should turn out just fine, and I of course have no way of knowing what SN actually uses in terms of percentages. I'll let you know what it tastes like once I've got something to sip. The Crystal flavor seems a bit delicate and might get overrun by the heavy wheat component, but I'm sure it'll turn out find. Perhaps I'll simply change the name from "Old Chico" to "Old (insert appropriate German town here)"

 

[ong]

Der ältere Chico!