This is Anni’s baby, she’s a big fan of Hefeweizens. I’m ok with them, but I’m not particularly fond of the style. This recipe was obtained from the BYO (Brew Your Own) recipe book, it’s clone of the Oberdorfer Hefeweizen with a twist. We added some coriander to the recipe and we also included a mash-out to ease up the sparge. So, here’s the recipe.

Grain

• 3.0 Kg Wheat malt (Finnish)
• 2.4 Kg Pale malt (Finnish)
• 450 gr Pilsner malt

Hops

• 26 gr Tettnanger (60 min boil) Pellet (Replacement for Hallertauer)
• 14 gr Cascade (2 min boil) Pellet (Replacement for Hallertauer)

Dry hopping

• None

Yeast

• WLP300 Hefeweizen yeast

Mashing

Since we a pre-final version of our “automated” system (again, more on this later), we decided to try a step mash. Here are the steps:

• 15 min at 50°C protein rest
• 45 min at 67°C saccharification rest
• 15 min at 75°C mash out

Boiling

90 min, normal boil. No hot break as no hops were added for the first 30 min.

Unusual/special ingredients 

• 1 teaspoon of dry irish moss as a clarifier (Not in original recipe)
• 1/2 teaspoon WLP yeast nutrient (Not in original recipe)
• 1.2 Litre yeast starter
• 22 gr Crushed coriander seed(5 min boil) (Not in original recipe)

Fermenting

• Planned for 2 weeks
• Temperature 21-22°C (Higher than suggested, but we can’t do anything about it since the weather is getting warmer)

Another change in this recipe was that we were told Finnish wheat malt caused bad efficiency so we changed the recipe a bit and added more malts. The original OG of the recipe was meant to be 1.052, with the added malts it was supposed to be 1.066, even with this, the pre-boil gravity was 1.051 (instead of 1.055) and the OG was 1.061 which was higher than the original recipe, but lower than the estimated value with changed recipe. This beer will most likely be medium high in ABV, estimated around 6.5% if we get a good attenuation.

Lessons learned

The most interesting thing about this batch was testing the step mash. We had a PT100 temperature transmitter in the mash connected to an on/off control, so the heating element was self-regulating itself this way. The step temperatures were reached faster than I expected them to. Overall it seems to have worked pretty well, and we had a decent efficiency considering what we heard about the efficiency problem with wheat malts. Let’s see how it turns out, we’ll keep ya posted!

l8rs!

/R