Ever since I bumped into a bee keeping local beer lover we've discussed making a honey wheat beer and sharing the batch and, this last holiday, I eventually got round to it.
The problem with adding honey to a beer is that honey tends to harbour rather a lot of wild yeasts. You can kill them by boiling but the simple act of boiling tends to drive off the honey aroma. Some brewers add it to the fermentation after the initial high krausen has died down and others prime the beer with it.
Being a bit of a prat, I decided to do all three. I added a jar and a half (about 350g) during the boil, a jar (227g) at the back end of the ferment and primed with 164g. If you're wondering why I've primed with so much sugar, an American homebrewer I've been speaking to on Twitter directed me to these extremely useful pages on priming solutions and how to calculate the amounts of sugar in them.
So, with the Honey Hill Wheat, I struggled with the volume of CO2 - it's not a measured term I've ever come across before. Turning to the table at the bottom of the page on priming solutions I've used the value 2.7 for American Wheat as I figured it was at the low end of fizzy. Once I decided that, the rest was pretty self explanatory and I ended up dissolving the honey into a little boiling water and put it in the brewfridge to warm condition for a week
3kg Pale Malt
3kg Wheat Malt
550g (ish) Honey + 164g for priming.
25G Hallertauer Hersbrucker 4%AA @ 60min
10g Sorachi 12.2 %aa @ 15 mins
Yeast Safbrew WB-06
OG 1055
FG 1006
ABV% 6.46
IBU 15.8
Brewlength 16L
Friday 20 January 2012
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How dis this turn out Sean?
ReplyDeleteReally pleased with it, Dave. It was pretty dry though but the flavour of the honey really shone through. Definitely going to brew it again and won't be changing a thing.
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