This post is one in a series following five brewers limiting themselves to a select set of ingredients and brewing several beers each with only those ingredients. The goal of these limitations is to push creativity and to see what can be done within the confines of a single set of ingredients. More about this concept can be found here. The ingredients chosen for this project were Maris Otter, White Wheat (malted), Light Munich, Amarillo, Nugget, WLP810 San Francisco Lager and WLP090 San Diego Super Yeast. The brewer must use all ingredients (with the exception of choosing one yeast strain). The rest of this series can be found here.

Author: T. Bowen

For my third and final beer in the Limitations Series, I wanted to do something that I had not done before. But I also wanted to brew something that I felt confident I would have success with and something that I would enjoy having on tap. While talking to my wife about how I wanted something a little more sessionable on tap than my usual NEIPAs, it occurred to me that I have never brewed a hoppy wheat before.

Even with our limited ingredients, I was hopeful I could pull off what I wanted. Normally I would like more options in the hop bill to bring more complexity. But I like Amarillo as far as fruity/tropical hops go, and I always get big orange and tangerine flavors from Amarillo, which I felt would work well with this. All of this coupled with a quick, clean yeast like WLP090 would hopefully give me the hoppy, sessionable beer to pair perfectly with our daily temps of 100+ degrees and smothering humidity.

Recipe

I decided to do this beer as a 4-gallon batch. Typically for beers that are a little out of my bailiwick, I do a 2- or 3-gallon batch to cut costs and have less volume in case it doesn’t turn out how I’d like. But I planned on a rather heavy-handed dry hop and knew that I would have some significant loss in the fermenter, so I went with a 4-gallon batch in hopes of ending up with at least 3 gallons in the keg.

I also wanted this beer to come out nice and yellow to compliment the significant haze I was planning on from the White Wheat occupying the majority of the grist, so I knew I wanted to keep the Light Munich in check. Despite the higher (than I’d like) percentage of Light Munich, Beersmith was showing an SRM I was comfortable with, so I rolled with it.

Finally, I planned to hop this like I hop the majority of my NEIPAs (and really any of my hoppy beers), i.e., a small bittering charge, whirlpool, and double dry hops. Usually, I do two whirlpools at different temperatures, but some recent research and reading has changed that process for me, and I’m now trying a single whirlpool at a different temp. Here’s where I landed:

Water: 3:1 Chloride:Sulfate

Mashed at 154°F for 60 minutes 59% White Wheat 23% Maris Otter 18% Light Munich

Boiled for 30 minutes 0.25 oz. Nugget (30 min.) at 14.2% AA (13.1 IBUs) 4 oz. Amarillo (180°F Whirlpool, 15 min.) at 7.7% AA (17.6 IBUs)

Double dry hopped 2 oz. Amarillo for 6 days (added 24 hours post-pitch) 2 oz. Amarillo for 1 day

Pitched WLP090 Super San Diego Pitched at 65°F Raised to 68°F at the end of fermentation

OG: 1.049

FG: 1.012

ABV: 4.8%

IBU: 30.7

SRM: 5.0

Brew Day

With the southern sun heating us north of 100°F, I did a full volume, no sparge mash to make things as quick as possible. Although I planned to mash at 152°F, I came in a little high at 154°F. I typically preheat my MT with a gallon or two of hot tap water. This was obviously not necessary in the current weather, and I wasn’t thinking.

I stirred like crazy, tossed in a small handful of ice cubes and stirred more to try and chill, and ultimately said, “forget it,” and let it ride. My mash tun barely loses one degree (weather dependent) over the course of a mash, so I was pleasantly surprised to see the mash temp at 152°F after 60 minutes, making me think that perhaps I was closer to my target mash temp than I had originally thought.

The boil was about as exciting as a pot of boiling wort can be, but I will say that I am loving 30 minutes boils. Once the boil starts, you’re in the home stretch and things move right along quite nicely.

Now came the fun part—chilling to whirlpool temps and ultimately pitching temps with 80+ degree groundwater. I wasn’t too worried though, because I use a small pond pump to pump ice water through my immersion chiller when it’s as hot as it was on this brew day. I cut the flame and turned on the pump only to realize that my little pump that had served me so well the last few years was dead. Oh well—I already had a cooler full of ice water, so I shoved as much of the input hose into the ice water as I could, hoping that a cold hose might somehow help.

Thankfully, it worked fairly well, at least to get to my whirlpool temperature of 180°F. I tossed in my whirlpool hops and recirculated for 15 minutes using a different pump. After the whirlpool, I pulled the hop spider to let it drain while I attempted to chill the batch as much as possible.

Chilling was painfully slow. After who knows how long, I got it down to 90°F, racked it to the fermenter, and put it in my fermentation chamber to continue chilling to pitching temp.

A few hours later, the wort had dropped to 65°F, and I pitched a 1.5L starter of WLP090. Less than 24 hours later, a healthy krausen was forming and I opted to add my first dry hop charge.

About six days later, I checked gravity, did my usual soft cold crash, and racked to a sanitized and purged keg with the second round of dry hops hanging in the keg. Per my usual process, I did a closed transfer, bubbling CO2 into the fermenter as the beer drained out the valve below.

After sitting on the second dry hop charge for about 24 hours, I pulled another gravity sample to confirm no change. The gravity was still at 1.012, making me confident it was done.

When I do a double dry hop this way, I typically rack to a serving keg off the second dry hop when I’m ready to carb/serve. But often times out of sheer laziness or the desire to see how the aroma/flavor changes in cold storage, I’ll just carb up the dry hop keg. And that’s what I opted for here, so into the keezer it went for carbonation.

Tasting

Appearance: Pours a medium dark golden/straw with nice foam. The color is a touch darker than I’d want, but otherwise I’m happy with appearance. So far so good.

Aroma: And this is where things start to drop off. In a big way. I get virtually nothing in the aroma. I pick up little to zero citrus/orange/tangerine that I typically get with Amarillo. About all I get in the nose is some earthiness, like wet dirt. It’s almost like all I am picking up is the Nugget, which is odd considering my hop ratios were roughly 3% Nugget and 97% Amarillo. Perhaps this was a subpar crop of Amarillo, or they weren’t stored optimally. I typically bulk buy my hops online, but these hops were purchased from a local shop, and I’ve questioned some of their hops before.

Flavor: Good body to the beer. But that’s about where the “good” ends. There’s a heavy earthy bitterness that lingers on the back of my palate more than I would like. I barely, just slightly get some bitter orange in the flavor, but that’s about it. It’s a very one dimensional, boring beer. Finally, there’s a slight bit of astringency that I’m sure is due to the extended dry-hop-turned-keg-hop.

Overall, I’m not thrilled with this beer. It’s certainly not a dumper, but I’m planning on racking it to another keg with a Citra keg hop to see if that brightens it up some to at least make the rest of the keg a bit more enjoyable.

If I were to brew this beer again only using these same ingredients, I would reduce the amount of Nugget used in an attempt to remove the earthy flavor I perceived. I would also bump up the amount of Amarillo used in the dry hop to increase the aroma, since this beer had almost none. Additionally, I would lower the Munich to 10%, max, and I would bump the Wheat up 10 percentage points. The beer came out a hair darker than I’d like, and dropping the Munich some would help with this. I’d also like to see if I could get even more mouthfeel by bumping up the wheat.

If I were to brew this beer again with no limitations, there are a few changes I would certainly make. First, I would either drop the Nugget outright or replace it with something else, like Magnum or Warrior. One thing I am certainly taking out of this Limitations Series is that I’m done with Nugget. I used to use it religiously as my bittering hop, and it always seemed fine. But now I’m thinking all those other beers with Nugget had so many other hops in them that any of the Nugget attributes I don’t like were being covered up. In this beer, though, it had nowhere to hide. I would also lower the amount of Munich and increase the amount of Wheat used, both by 10%, for the same reasons mentioned above. Probably my favorite part of this beer is having a sub-5% ABV beer on tap.

Beer 1 Beer 2 Beer 3 Beer 4 Beer 5 Style Hoppy Wheat Pale Ale/Lager IPL NEIPA/IPA Munich Lager Maris Otter 34.4% 50% 50% 82% 30% Light Munich 5.5% 25% 41% 7% 60% Wheat 60.1% 25% 9% 11% 10% Hop Addition 1 28.7 IBUs Nugget (60 min.) 41.3 IBUs Nugget (First Wort) 21 IBUs Nugget (30 min.) 41.8 IBUs Nugget (First Wort) 24.4 IBUs Nugget (60 min.) Hop Addition 2 5.5 IBUs Amarillo (5 min.) 5.8 IBUs Amarillo (15 min.) 23 IBUs Amarillo—30 min. Whirlpool 4.8 IBUs Amarillo (20 min Whirpool at 170F) 8.9 IBUs Nugget (10 min.) Hop Addition 3 7.1 IBUs Nugget (5 min.) 2.3 IBUs Nugget (5 min.) N/A 0.8 IBUs Amarillo & Nugget (20 min Whirlpool at 120F) 6.8 IBUs Amarillo (5 min.) Hop Addition 4 16.8 IBUs Amarillo—30 min. Whirlpool 0 IBUs Amarillo (flameout) N/A N/A N/A Hop Addition 5 22 IBUs Nugget—30 min. Whirlpool N/A N/A N/A N/A Dry Hop 2.5 oz. Amarillo, 2 oz. Nugget (10 days) N/A 2 oz. Amarillo @ Day 1; 2 oz. Amarillo @ Day 4 1 oz. Amarillo & 0.5 oz. Nugget @ Day 2, 1 oz. Amarillo @ Day 8; 2 oz. Amarillo & 0.5 oz. @ Day 8 N/A Yeast WLP090 at 64°F, raised to 70°F WLP090 at 66°F, raised to 72°F; WLP810 at 63°F WLP810 at 65°F, raised to 68°F WLP090 WLP810 at 60°F, raised to 65°F OG 1.059 1.058 1.050 1.063 1.055 FG 1.012 1.009/1.014 1.010 1.012 1.013 ABV 6.2% 6.5%/5.8% 5.3% 6.7% 5.5%

Beer 6 Beer 7 Beer 8 Beer 9 Beer 10 Style California Common Hoppy Wheat American Pale Ale ESB Sticke Altbier Maris Otter 30% 21% 50% 80% + 10% baked 9.3% Light Munich 60% 12% 41% 5% 72.1% Wheat 10% 67% 9% 5% 18.6% Hop Addition 1 28.2 IBUs Nugget (30 min.) 23 IBUs Nugget (45 min.) 21 IBUs Nugget (30 min.) 24.4 IBUs Nugget (60 min.) 16.8 IBUs Nugget (60 mi.) Hop Addition 2 4.35 IBUs Amarillo (5 min.) 8.2 IBUs Nugget (15 min.) 23 IBUs Amarillo (0 min.) 6.1 IBUs Nugget (15 min.) 15.8 IBUs Nugget (45 min.) Hop Addition 3 1 oz. Amarillo (165ºF Whirlpool for 20 min.) N/A N/A 2.4 IBUs Nugget (5 min.) 14.2 IBUs Amarillo (15 min.) Hop Addition 4 N/A N/A N/A N/A 5.7 IBUs Amarillo (5 min.) Hop Addition 5 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A Dry Hop 2 oz. Amarillo 1 oz. Amarillo for 9 days; 1 oz. Amarillo for 4 days 1 oz. Amarillo & 1 oz. Nugget day 1 of fermentation; 2 oz. Amarillo day 4 of fermentation 1 oz. Amarillo N/A Yeast WLP810 at 65°F WLP090 at 65°F for 5 days; raised to 72°F over 5 days WLP090 WLP810 at 65°F for 4 days; raised to 70°F over 4 days Wyeast 2112 (WLP810 equivalent) at 60°F; raised to 67°F over 7 days OG 1.050 1.059 1.055 1.057 1.055 FG 1.012 1.009 1.010 1.014 1.014 ABV 5% 6.6% 5.9% 5.6% 5.4%

Beer 11 Beer 12 Style Festbier Hoppy Wheat Maris Otter 64% 23% Light Munich 18% 18% Wheat 18% 59% Hop Addition 1 23 IBUs Nugget (60 min.) 13.1 IBUs Nugget (30 min.) Hop Addition 2 10.4 IBUs Amarillo (30 min.) 19.6 IBUs Amarillo (Whirlpool) Hop Addition 3 N/A N/A Hop Addition 4 N/A N/A Hop Addition 5 N/A N/A Dry Hop N/A 2 oz. Amarillo for 6 days; 2 oz. Amarillo for 1 day Yeast WLP810 at 58°F, raised to 70°F WLP090 at 65°F, raised to 68°F OG 1.052 1.049 FG 1.008 1.012 ABV 5.8% 4.8%