Number Two: German Style Wheat Beer

Brewing

Brewing the Lovebite Weizenbier from Papazian’s “The Complete Joy of Homebrewing” was exciting for a couple of reasons.  First of all, I love wheat beers although I am usually more a fan of Belgian style wheat beers.  This beer is a German style wheat beer.  Second, it was our second homebrew and after the first brew we were looking forward to making something a little more drinkable.  Third, we decided to make this beer from the recipe which meant we got to purchase each individual ingredient as opposed to using a kit like the first beer we made.  To us this felt a little more personal than using a kit, we just hoped that we picked out the right ingredients.

The brewing started on Sunday September 6, 2009.  I started preparing for the brewing process in the morning by sanitizing all the bottles and boiling the water that would not be cooked.  After a late dinner and a decent dose of margaritas we began our brewing.  During this brewing experience there was not much different than typical extract brewing.  The only interesting thing was that this season’s yield of Hallertauer hops apparently had a low alpha acid count so we were told that we probably would want to add a little more than the recipe called for.  At the time I was unsure of exactly how to calculate what was needed and since the recipe called for full hops and I could only find hop pellets I decided to just go with the exact amount called for in the recipe.  Typically it is said that you want to use around %20 more full hops than hop pellets so normally I would have used %20 less hop pellets than what was required b the recipe.  As it turned out we completely forgot what we were doing and added the full ounce of hops that came in the bag.  The recipe only called for 3/4 ounce…  Oh well, we then deemed we would call our version of Lovebite Weizenbier “Pat and Tom’s Hoppyweizen”.

This beer really shocked me while it was in the fermenter.  Unlike the first beer we decided to use the glass carboy as the primary fermenter so that we could see what was going on inside.  The yeast started fermenting like mad after about 3-4 hours.  Our first beer took almost 3 days to start visible fermentation.  For this beer I actually had to improvise and use my racking cane as a stand-in blow-off tube.  This tube was used to blow off the krausen (foam on top of the beer during fermentation) which includes oils that lead to hangovers and other particulate matter from brewing.  I estimated that around 1/10th of the 5 gallons of beer was blown off during the fermentation process.

Bottling

After 6 days in the fermenter we decided it was about time to bottle.  The fermentation had slowed down to quite a long time between bubbles.  Working as a team we quickly bottled around 46 bottles of beer which included two large bottles for the sake of trying something different.  My basement smelled absolutely superb as we bottled the beer and we tasted the last bit.  We were left with about half a bottle worth of extra beer so we just drank it like we did with the first beer.  It tasted surprisingly good and not quite as hoppy as I would have imagined after adding the extra 1/4 ounce of hop pellets.

Tasting

We let the beer sit for 1 week in the bottle before opening it for our first tasting.  We were not quite sure what to make of it but the beer tasted pretty decent.  Luckily when we opened the beer after the 2 week mark it was quite delicious.  It was easy to say that this beer was a vast improvement over the first.  I was traveling down to visit my mom and dad for my dad’s birthday so I brought some of the wheat beer and he too agreed that it was much better.  After how much I had disliked the first beer I was really happy to find that I was not a completely terrible homebrewer.

The only thing that bothered me was that I tasted a slight but very similar flavor to the first beer we had brewed.  It took me a couple weeks to get it to the Maryland Homebrew store but I finally managed to get it there.  In my next post I will let you know what I learned from the nice people at Maryland Homebrew.

In a couple weeks I will get to have my friends try the beer at our Oktoberfest party.  It will be a little late for the traditional Oktoberfest but it should be fun anyway.  My hope is that my friends will like the beer as much as I did.