Home brew update: Its now a Dunkel weizen

Today was bottling day for my latest brew. As you may recall from my last blog posts - this was based on the successful Hefeweizen brew that i made back in March. Though with some tweaks due to the availability of ingredients. These being a change of yeast from the excellent white labs Hefeweizen liquid yeast to a dry Bavarian Wheat yeast. This immediately changing the style of beer from a Hefe to a straight forward weizen. For those not really down with the terminology - that pretty much means that the finished beer will not be cloudy and have a slightly different taste. Hefe being German for yeast - as the hefeweizen is a wheat beer that has a cloudy affect as there is a yeast left in the beer after fermentation. The bavarian wheat yeast works well and produces a good wheat beer result but will not leave behind much yeast and therefore the beer will not be cloudy. Upon tasting it also appears that the banana-y taste (as it seems to me) that is prevelant in a lot of hefe's is absent from this beer, though it does have a very nice robust wheat beer flavour nontheless.

The second ingredient change was the adding of 500g of dark rye malt at the mashing stage. This was added purely because i had bought it for an idea i had to make a dark whisky tinged beer when i was experiment but was left when i realised these flavour beers werent working. The thought process was that whatever flavour was given off by this malt would be negligible in the final beer because of the small proportion of it that is the dark rye. It has however, significantly darkened the beer from a light amber to a dark brown thats more consistent with a dunkel weizen. Dunkel being German for dark and this being a style that is more suited for the winter months, a heavier more full flavoured kind of style. Which considering we'll be into August  before it has finished bottle conditioning means that it probably is quite apt. The main taste difference i can get from it at this stage is a definitely more bitter finish and a more treacley taste as opposed to the caramel tones of March's hefe.

So, where i have learned my lessons from previous brews. I have remember to take measurements of the gravity of the beer at the start and end of fermentation so am this time able to pretty accurately put an abv figure on it. My starting gravity was 1.060 and final was 1.014 which is consistent with a beer with a 5.8% abv. Not bad, stronger than previous brews and around the figure i wanted - this is probably helped by the fact i had an extra 500g of malt and also added 500g of brown sugar before fermentation.

Talking of sugar. As discussed previously i have now taken to bottle conditioning rather than in a barrel. So today was all about taking the beer from its fermentation tub straight to the vessel it'll be served from (the bottle). You add sugar to each bottle to aid carbonation. I learned today that i may have been far too generous with the sugar with previous brews. I had had to empty a load of bottles as i had beer that wasn't good enough to drink in them and needed to use the bottles for this new brew. As i opened them to empty them, a few of them were shooting out of the bottle as soon as the cap was released - obviously too much sugar had caused too much carbonation. So its a conservative half teaspoon a bottle now rather than the heaped teaspoon of before.

Lastly, previous bottling had been tedious affairs where i've had problems keeping the siphoning tube in place whilst trying to bottle by myself. Inevitably leading to shouting my wife over to help to much grumbling and complaining. Today though i found that the hole for the airlock on the second fermentation tub i'd bought (which this brew was in) was exactly the right size to hold my siphoning tube. So by removing the airlock and feeding the tube through the hole - i was able to lodge it firmly and securely into the tub and hovering at exactly the right level above the line of sediment of spent yeast at the bottom. This made the job a lot faster - i managed to bottle and cap 41 bottles in about 41 mins and it also meant i was able to maximise the amount of useable liquid in the tub.

So two weeks and i can give the full verdict on this beer. Until then i will be keeping an eye on the brew stores website for stocks of hefeweizen yeast so i can plan another proper hefeweizen brew soon too.

In other news, my wife and i have planned an October/November euro trip and i'll be hoping to sample and review some beers in Amsterdam, Lubeck, Malmo, Copenhagen, Hamburg and Osnabruck. As well as bring back some AppleKorn to enjoy......nom.