BREWDAY: Red River Dunkelweizen

I have named this beer "Red River" in honor of my family's move to Texas. Also, I am hoping it will be red. My process is still working out the kinks, and there's just no way to be sure that I'm going to nail the color red. The name is hopeful. I am placing the name upon the beer, as if it might cast the spell upon it that encourages the color red to appear. (A brewer's mantra: A red river flows through you... A red river flows through you... A red river flows through you...?)

Why red? Because with the hint of chinese five spice and bay leaf, I'm really hoping to get a little taste of autumn in the glass.

Recipe:

2 lbs and 11 ounces of Rahr Red Wheat

1 lb of 2-row pale

4 ounces of homemade caramel/crystal malt

2 ounces of homemade chocolate wheat malt

.2 ounces of Styrian Celeja at 60 minutes for 8.81 IBU

.2 ounces of Styrian Celeja at 15 minutes for 4.37

1 bay leaf at 15 minutes

.5 tsp homemade Chinese Five Spice Blend at 15 minutes

.2 ounces of Cluster at 5 minutes for 2.73 IBU

Mashing this, I put all the grain in to room temperature water, and brought it up gently to 120-125 degrees, and held it there for ten minutes, stirring and allowing to settle. I thought it might help with the haziness of the last brew, even though such things are to style. After that, I brought it up to mash temp for medium body at 154, and then threw it into the pre-heated oven. 

Concerned about my conversion last time, and still sans refractometer, I went the other extreme. I did an overnight mash, in the oven. After about an hour, I flipped the oven off, and left it closed. I let the grain and water rest until the next day in the warm oven, hopefully converting everything. (My PH and water chemistry research continues, naturally, but I'm trying simple solutions first.)

In the morning, I put it all out on the stove and it was 144 degrees! (I'm sure I got about as much conversion as possible when it stayed successfully warm for so long!)

From there, I brought up the temperature to mash-out at 170, and then drained out the grains. (With those grains, I brewed up some bread to go with the beer. See prior post!)

This was the easy boil I had heard about in a biab, with no boilovers and not even a moment's unrest over such things. Additions were added. Coffee was enjoyed. Cooling off in the sink was simple.

Breaking up the brewday process with an overnight mash was very nice. It gave me something to look forward to in the morning, and spreads the time spent brewing out a while.

Once the wort cooled to pitching temps, I put this straight down onto the yeastcake from the Golden Cloud Ale, and it seems to have made beer. I hit it with lots of ice during the week, and kept it down. The smell out of the fermentor has a lot more balance of banana against the clove. I'll be bottling soon. Hopefully, I'll be drinking soon, too!

Pictures:

 <-filtering out the hops and escaped grains before the primary! In small batch brewing, I want all the beer I can get, and I don't want to lose any to trub and crud like this!

Man, I need to get me one of these:

Fermentation Station

Danstar Munich is cooking right now. It took a while for it to wake up, possibly because I underpitched, possibly because I did a pretty rough and basic mash - no protein rest, etc. - and possibly because I used San Antonio tap water that was boiled in an open container to clear off the chemistry, leaving behind a lot of the minerals in our hard, limey water.

The spare room/office is still pretty crowded from our recent move. We're slowly settling in. In the mean time, this room is the perfect place for the beer. The ambient temperature is 74 degrees, and I'm throwing water bottles in and out of the freezer every few hours to get a fermentation range in an un-measured temperature that's probably about eight to ten degrees cooler. (As I unpack more, my thermometer might appear out of a box, and I could really know for sure!)

I'm hoping for most of the flavor out of the Danstar Munich yeast, and along those lines, I'm not aiming for a clean fermentation. I underpitched on purpose to stress the yeast a little, and I'm letting it go on the warm side of its range to up the yeast's distinctive characteristics away from a super traditional weizen.

For me, one of the reasons I love the system of a fermentation bucket inside of a larger water bucket with ice bottles, is that it will make every batch just a little bit different, even with the same ingredients. I will never perfectly nail any one temperature, and every batch will be an adventure. I will never know exactly what will come out each time. I only know that when I'm close, it will be good. How good? The excitement of not really knowing exactly how good it will be fuels my excitement for the batch to ferment.

There's an excitement in a more manual and less-machine-like process. There's an adventure to it. Also, it's a lot cheaper than running a second fridge just for buckets of beer, and it gives me something to do to stay close to my beer, interacting with it and helping it along.

Swamp coolers are recommended for busy bodies like me that like to feel like they're always doing something!

Next Entry: More Roasting of Malts!