Batch 122 – Hefeweizen (All-grain): Step One in the 2015 Weizen Experiment

It has been two months plus since I last posted.  It has also been two months since I last brewed – and I am five batches behind (having brewed through 126 batches) and about to brew my Weihnachtsbier this weekend.

As usual, life intrudes, but I’m hoping to get a little caught up on a lot of things in the few days off I have over Thanksgiving, including posting, and brewing and drinking beer!

My first attempt at an all-grain hefeweizen and the first stage of my third annual weizen experiment where I brew a hefeweizen, followed by a dunkelweizen, followed by a weizenbock.  I was a little nervous about this since my extract and grain hefeweizens were all generally pretty excellent and I wasn’t sure if I could make as good a hefeweizen using an all-grain recipe.

As with the other all-grain batches, the first step was converting  my old hefeweizen recipe.   It looked like this:

• 5.0 pounds of Pilsner Malt
• 5.0 pounds Wheat Malt
• 1.0 pound Rice Hulls
• 0.5 pounds Munich (10°)
• 1.5 ounces Hallertau Hops (3.8%)
• White Labs 351 (Bavarian Weizen Yeast)

All-grain hefeweizen ingredients

My targets, based on Brew Pal, are:

• Original Gravity:  1056
• Final Gravity:  1014
• ABV:  5.5%
• 19 IBU
• 4.2 Lovibond

The brew day went smoothly, but cooling 5 gallons of hot wort in the south in July is a challenge, especially when the temperature of the cold tap water straight out of the faucet is just over 80 degrees!  I used my wort chiller to bring the temperature down as far as I could, but the wort was still at 86 degrees after 40 minutes of cooling.  I ended up putting the wort into the chest freezer I use as a lagering/serving container, and pitched the yeast a couple hours later when the wort had cooled to fermenting temperatures.

My original gravity was 1.054, which was just below my target of 1.056.  After 10 days of fermentation, my final gravity was 1.010.  After two weeks in my chest freezer, I kegged and carbonated it two weeks later.

The color came out about where I wanted it to be – a nice light gold color.

Good color!

Overall, I was a little disappointed in how it came out.  Color and carbonation was what I wanted it, but flavor?  It was almost too hoppy for a hefeweizen, and I didn’t end up with a noticeable flavor profile from the yeast that I would normally get.  I definitely thought my extract and grain hefeweizen was superior to this batch.

Looking good, but the flavor is not quite there.