Batch 19

Because of my failure with making a white IPA in Batch 15 and the lack of “wheat flavor” this batch became inevitable so here it is, my first true wheat beer!

Historically I’ve never been a fan of wheat beer but I guess I started to fancy it half a year ago, otherwise I probably wouldn’t be sitting here with my own made wheat beer even if it could be fun to try styles just to see if I can make it as they come from commercial brews. It also speeds up and makes it easier to select a proper yeast for my white IPA so it becomes a white IPA and not just.. IPA. My thinking is that most of that recipe is good and that the selected yeast was at fault so hopefully only some tweaks can make it really good.

Enough of that damn IPA, this batch should be all about wheat beer! Alright, so I followed the recipe HelVete by Strömsholms Brygghus and  it was kinda straight forward, half wheat malt, half pale ale malt and a very small dose of peated malt which at least to my pallet wasn’t noticeable. From reading a lot of posts and information on the interwebs, my understanding was that I should aim for a lot of esters so it would taste a lot of banana, which I think I succeeded with. It at least taste like banana, or in my opinion a special banana flavored candy, and I like it!

I’ve no idea if I managed to create enough flavor but I tried to create a lot of esters by letting the fermentation go 1 degree Celcius more than what I aimed for. Let me explain, since I can control what temperature the fermentation has I raised how quickly the control unit should start cooling again so I aimed for 21 degrees, and when it reached 22.1 it started cooling instead of the usual 0.5 difference. The idea is that the fermentation can go a bit wild and crazy if it’s not cooled which causes more esters, if it’s cooled on the other hand it’s “restrained” and less esters are produced. But I’ve no clue if it made big enough difference and it’s hard for me to tell since I haven’t tasted enough wheat beers but I guess it could be tested on IPAs as well, it would be a good test since I’ve brewed a few IPAs now and should be able to taste the difference (if there’s any).

The beer itself is very good, nice candy banana flavor to start with and finishes with a malty breadiness, nice! The only downside right now is that I made 12 liters instead of full batch of 23, but always easier to be clever after the fact right. This was an experiment kind of anyway and those should not be too big just in case I make something undrinkable. I’ll be making more wheat beers though, that’s for sure!

More of a side note,  I was making mulled wine at the same time and wanted to cold crash the wine and since I only have one fridge for this I skipped this step for the wheat beer. The timing was good because I didn’t want to cold crash the wheat beer anyway, it should be cloudy and not clear and I think there’s ways to keep it cloudy even with lowering the temperature but I didn’t want to risk it. The downside of this was that i transferred the beer to the keg at 20 Celsius and by this temperature the force carbonation doesn’t work as well as it does at lower temperatures, for some reason the temperature make it more difficult for the liquid to bind itself with the carbon dioxide. It worked out in the end but a good lesson learned to always cool the beer to make life easier.