Transcript:

Today I’m brewing one of my favorite styles of German beer. It’s a style that not only tolerates but actually benefits from a bit of abuse at the fermentation stage.Well at first you have to baby it through the mash process.

I’m talking about German Hefeweizen or Weissbier. I’m going to brew one up while putting a counterflow chiller to the test.

hi, I’m Martin Keen and I’m taking the Homebrew challenge to brew 99 different bear styles. and I have made it to the German wheat beer category. Now one of the very first beers I did on my Homebrew challenge was another wheat beer, but that was an American wheat bear. It’s time to brew a wheat beer and unlike its German counterpart, which has esters of banana and clove and American wheat, there is bready, grainy, and a little bit hoppy.

So yeah, this time we are going to go for those banana and clove esters and we’re going to get them through the yeast that we using.

So in the recipe for this beer, while the style guidelines say that at least 50% of the beer needs to come from wheat malt. So I have here five pounds of pale German wheat malt, so that’s really my main base molt. In addition to that, I’m going to combine the wheat malt with pills, the malt and I am using two ounces of German Pilsner malt and two ounces of Bohemian floor malted Pilsner malt. And then just to add a little bit of a extra malt character, I’m adding four ounces of melanoidin malt. Now to make up for the lack of husks with the wheat malt, I’m going to add my own. I have here in bucket of rice hulls. I’m going to add eight ounces of rice hulls into my grist to help keep the mash moving. Now rice holes, they add nothing to the beer as such. There’s no sugar going to be extracted from these. This is going to do nothing for my gravity, but it should keep the mash recirculating.

Mashing here at 152 Fahrenheit to get to a pre ball gravity of 10 40. We’ll mash for about an hour, although actually I suspect it’ll take quite a bit less time than that to get to 10 40. So the way I’ve been chilling wort up until now is with an immersion chiller. This is the one I’ve been using from Jaded. It’s pretty simple. Cold water goes in and comes out the other end recirculates through this copper tubing and you put this into the kettle that you want to call or uh, immerse it. And it’s just the contact between the wort and then these cold copper pipes that chills things down. And you need to make sure that you give it a good stir to make sure that the temperature is even in the whole kettle. Now compare that to a counterflow chiller. Now the difference with this is you do not immerse it in the brew pot.

This will sit outside of the kettle. We’re still gonna send water in the top here and it’s going to come out of the bottom, but we’re also going to be adding wort in here as well. So within this there are actually two separate tubes, one for the water and one for the wort, and where the counterflow part comes in is that the water comes in from the top and travels down and the word is pumped in from the bottom and travels up and that’s the wort in that tube goes past the cold water going in the other way. That’s how the chilling happens. Now the advantage of using a counterflow chiller over an immersion chiller is that you don’t need to stir the wort to make sure you’re getting an even distribution of the temperature. So it’s going to be interesting to see how this compares to my immersion chiller. Draining to the button kettle now, it took about 45 minutes to get mashed to a temperature corrected pre ball gravity of 10.40 so now it’s time to start thinking about the hops. And there’s not an awful lot to think about. This is not by any means a hoppy beer. It’s bittering hops only and we’re only going to get to an IBU of about 13. With this beer you can use pretty much whatever you want. I am using half an ounce of Perle hops.

So the rice hulls, they seem to have worked really well. Everything in the mash was moving pretty well there. So I’ve hooked up the counter flow chiller now to my system. So the beer is going to come out at the bottom of the kettle, through the pump, and the wort will go into the bottom of this counter flow chiller. It will then cycle through, come out the top, and then dump in the top of the kettle. Now before I start cooling, I am just going to recirculate the wort just to sanitize everything inside there. Now remember because this is accounts flow chiller, the cold water is coming in the top exiting the bottom and going into my sink. All right, let’s turn on the water.

all right. And we’re done. That took about 15 minutes and uh, maybe a hair slower than it would have been with the immersion chiller. But the wonderful thing about this is that I was just able to leave it completely unattended and go about my business, cleaning up the brewery. So I wasn’t having to stand over it and stir like crazy. So I’m impressed. This is a really nice quality piece of equipment from Brown supply and I think it’s gonna be pretty easy to clean as well because I can just run from PBW through it and then flush it out with water. Okay. Now let’s talk about the yeast that I’m putting in this. And I mentioned a little earlier that you can kind of abuse this beer a little bit at fermentation time. And the reason I say that is because we want to get those banana and clove esters.

And the way we’re going to do that is by just stressing the yeast just, just a little bit. So I uh, I took some W L P 300, this is Hefeweizen yeast and instead of making my usual starter, I split a single vial of yeast into 10 little test tubes like I normally do. Took one of those and then ran that in a year, starter just for 12 hours. Normally I do like 24 or 48 hours, so there’s much less yeast in here then normal. I’m going to pitch this and the yeast is now going to have to really get to work and as it’s doing that, hopefully it will start to develop those banana and clove esters.

Theres one way to find out.

All right, so its tasting time, I have Andy with me fresh off the boat as it were from England. Welcome Andy, all the way from England for a beer just for a beer . Yeah, Hefeweizen. So a little little a fermentation note about this beer. Um, I literally had almost nothing with it during fermentation, so I left it, uh, at its fermentation temperature, didn’t cold crash it, put it straight in the keg. And here it is, didn’t cold crash because this is supposed to be a cloudy beer. So, um, didn’t want to try to clarify it. So, um, we’ll take a look at first of all the appearance of this Hefeweizen beer. See what ya, So we think. It’s looking quite nice. Real light. Yeah. It’s got a definitely is cloudy, can’t really see through it, which is desirable in this case. Very much so.

Very much so. Right, right. So let’s try aroma now what we think it smells like. The style guidelines say that you should some sort of clove or banana, uh, esters from the smell. I can definitely get banana definitely get banana in there, yeah. Yep. So that, that really comes from the yeast that is used with the beer. Hefeweizen, Hefeweizen, that’s right. So, uh, yeah, so I’m really pleased actually at how prominent that smell is. That smells to me like a proper German wheat beer. It really, really does. I’ve done a lot of work in Germany and this is actually smelling pretty good. Now, you mentioned that hypervisor is one of your favorite beer styles, so kind of nervous about you’re tasting it, but let’s go and move. Hey, sure. It’s all my friend, my friend. What you think Saval, first?.

Ooh, that’s, that’s really quite good. Yeah, hits the back, doesn’t it? It’s got a little delay on it. Can’t really taste the banana so much, but the cloves are coming in the back, right? Yeah, very much so. There’s a clove taste of more of a banana smell. Yeah, I mean, I’ll take that. That’s a, that’s, that’s really, that’s really good. This may or may not be true, but you said that there is a clear version of a Hefeweizen. I seem to remember from a, from Germany there’s a thing called a “Krystalweizen” where you can actually sort of see more through it, so it’s a wheat beer. It’s a clear wheat beer. That’s what, that’s what I seem to remember. My memory may be literally clouded, but that’s the kind of thing. So they, when you say, can I have any vice beer, please. They wouldn’t. You won’t. Krystal or regular?

All right, Andy, well, thank you for, uh, for flying all the way over here just to try this beer. Okay. Um, we’re going to hit to the airport now and head all the way back. No, it’s been an absolute pleasure, Martin. I appreciate it.

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