Wheat Beer: One for the ladies

  Generally speaking my test for whether or not I have made a good beer is to give it to my female friends.  When the look on their face is utter distaste, I know I have a winner.  Unfortunately that is not necessarily a good thing when you are trying to create a beer list for a brew pub (remember that is the main inspiration for brewing. That, and because beer is delicious).  In order to appeal to the fairer sex I decided to make a wheat beer. The concept is a mix between an american wheat and a belgian witbier.

Ingredients:
Grains:
Wheat Malt
2-row
Flaked Wheat
Flaked Oats

Hops:
Hallertauer
Saaz

Yeast:

Wyeast Belgian Witbier 

Misc:

Orange Peel

Irish  Moss

Mashed at 156 for a sweeter, maltier taste.  

The color after mashing was opaque and very light.

5 minutes before the end of the boil I added the rind of 6 oranges.

The color after the boils is a darker, opaque white.

After a week of fermentation I bottled 1/4 of the batch (~12 bottles).  The beer tastes a lot like a blue moon AFTER you already added the orange.

Why only 12 bottles you ask? Well, that's when things got crazy.  I decided to split the batch a total of 4 ways.  I am not a huge fan of wheat beers (even delicious ones that this one obviously will be), so I figured if there were only 12 bottles of each kind then I could conceivably drink it all.  To each batch I added something different.  To one: raspberries, to the second: pineapple, and the third I dry hopped with centennial hops.

After a week the beers took on the characteristics of the fruit that was added.  In the case of the raspberry, the beer literally sucked the color right out of the fruit, leaving the beer pink and the berries white.

Bottling the separate batches was a little more tedious than I realized. Well, than I realized before it was too late. About three days after added the fruit, when I was planning the bottling, I came to understand the added work I had created for myself.  Because the beer was coming from three separate vessels I had to re-clean and re-santize everything between each batch. That includes the bottling bucket, the siphoning tube, and the bottling tubes.  Not to mention re-starting a siphon every time.  To add to the work the fruit kept getting stuck in the tubing.  That being said, the final result was 12 bottles of 4 different wheat beers, not bad for a days work.

1. Standard wheat (orangey)
2. Raspberry wheat
3. Pineapple wheat
4. Dry hopped wheat

In the future I will not split a batch of beer so many ways.  The added work is not exactly worth it.  Splitting a batch 2 (maybe 3) ways is more than enough.


In bottles: coffee porter, ipa, brown ale, wheat (all 4)
Fermenting: blonde ale (behind on the posting)
On deck: IPA take 2 with some improvements