Wedding Beer Catchup #4: Mr Darcy Hefeweizen

The last beer for the wedding is a hefeweizen. It's hard to argue with a hefe on a summers day. Although I guess if you're trying to argue with a beer you have other problems. Beer can't talk. I feel pretty confident with my process for hefeweizens and that kind of security is good when brewing for other people.

Yeast on a plate ready to go into a 5ml vial

Stepped up from 2ml to 20ml

The yeast was one I'd made a plate of back when I brewed the leichtes weizen. It was a simple matter to use my sterilised inoculation loop to scoop up some yeast and deposit it in the vial. Once the yeast was happily fermenting in the vial I stepped it up into a mini erlenmeyer, then into a 250ml erlenmeyer and finally into my 2L erlenmeyer. Several steps but it worked out very well and each time I do it I feel a bit more confident about my processes.

Bernie milling the grain and pulling faces

This brew is pretty similar to the leichtes weizen I brewed for the competition. I went for a 30 minute ferulic acid rest and was planning on a gravity of 1.046. My efficiency was a bit lower than I expected, something that seems to happen often when I use wheat, and I ended up with 1.043 in the fermenter. Will and Bernie helped out with this one and it all went nice and smoothly.

Mr Darcy Hefeweizen (21L batch)

Will helping Bernie mill the grain

OG: 1.043
FG: 1.011
IBU: 13
EBC: 5.7
ABV: 4.2%

60% Best Malz wheat malt
40% Weyermann Bohemian Pilsner malt

15g Aramis @ 60 minutes

1.2L starter of WLP 300 built up from a plate. Shooting for a pitch of 190 billion cells. Fermented at 17C for 5 days and then increased to 19C to finish it off.

3g CaSO4, 7g CaCl2, 3g MgSO4 to increase the calcium and keep the profile balanced

Stepped mash: 42C (30 min), 63C (raised from 42C with an infusion of boiling water, 40 min), 72C (15 minutes) and mashed out at 78C.

60 seconds of oxygen after cooling

07/12/13 - Brewed with Will & Bernie

21/12/13 - Bottled