Chilling on the backyard with Mrs. North on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. Kids were playing, birds chirping, beers were cold.
6 lbs 65/35 Wheat LME from Northern Brewer
1.5oz backyard mix for 60 min.
Chilled.
Bring to 5 gal. volume.
Pitch dry Danstar wheat yeast directly to the wort.
When it comes to hefewizen, I just let the yeast do the work. Simple malt, light hops, add yeast, stress them out a little to add flavor.
Hour 16 or so, open up the fermenter and covered loosely with tinfoil.
+78 f. for the first day dropped to 78 as fermentation slowed down.
Resealed fermenter before the krausen dropped back down. (probably should have skimmed)
Brewed: July 14th 2019
Racked: Never. This will prove to be my downfall.
Packaged: 8/21/2019
So, this beer soured. Hard. Because I'm dumb. For open fermentation, the beer needs to be racked out from under the krausen. There's a pucker factor present now.
July 202 Update
It's coming up on a year old, a full year in a cold keg! The beer is puckeringly sour but not to the point where the back of your tongue will scream out in pain. It seemed to sour to a point and then stabilize there.
It's thinner than a wheat and perfectly clear. The fermenting beer had a krausen so I'm confident that it fermented with the German Wheat yeast before the lacto took over. Surprisingly, there's no sign of bananas or cloves at all. It's actually a decent sour base beer, although I wouldn't want to enter it into any contests.
July 9th 2020 - tasty
It cuts through on a hot day
I'm still not sure what I want to do with this beer. (and the keg that it's in ) I need to check it to see what kind of pelicle it has floating on it. Maybe I could start a "sour program" and transfer fermented beer into that keg. I like the idea but I need to get a better handle on the funk milk that I like the best.
Update: I packaged the remaining 2 gallons in 22oz bottles. No pelicle in the keg, just clean beer.
- Brew North