My original plan was to make an all-grain wit beer just after Xmas, but we're going through a heatwave at the minute (38 degrees C today, higher tomorrow!) so I've given up trying to keep the beer temperature down and am once again embracing saison yeast. However I had the grain for a wit beer pre-ground, so I thought I'd try a Wit / Saison hybrid.
The dominant factor in a Wit beer is the use of wheat, so my grain bill was
2.5kg malted wheat
1kg pale malt
0.5kg Munich malt
but my hop schedule was more akin to a saison or an American pale
50g Northern brewer (60 min)
45g Saaz (30 min)
45g EK Goldings (5 mins)
Because of the small proportions of my brewpot I've decided to give up trying to max out the sugars in an all-grain brew and instead just add extra malt extract to hit the right gravity. So in some ways I'm doing a Brew-In-The-Bag partial mash, I think! The process was -
Mash grains in a brew bag @ 67 degrees for 1 hr
Drain & squeeze bag into the brewpot for 5 minutes or so
Put the brewpot back on the heat and sparge (ie soak) the bag in 70 degree (ish) water for 10 minutes or so before draining & squeezing
Add the sparge water to the brewpot (which was just about coming to boil)
When it comes back to the boil, throw in the 60 min hops and start the clock
Hop according to schedule, and add 1kg malt extract at around 30 minutes
Relax and have a homebrew
You need to be careful adding the hops to a near-boiling mix as the extra surface area you're introducing to the liquid gives lots of nucleation sites - ie points for a boil to spontaneously occur. In real terms that means that after you throw your hops in and without changing the heat your pot will go from this
to this, and beyond
in about 20 seconds. So keep an eye on it and better still brew outside to minimise any clean-up. That also means that you can do other manly things as the boil continues...
The first sparge is in the pot and it's close to full, but there were still extra sugars available in the grain. Previously I've carried out a second sparge, boiled and cooled that and added it to the fermenter(which means a lot of additional faffing around) so this time I decided to try to make a weaker beer out of the final sparge - I'll cover that in more detail in the next post.
After that it's business as usual - cool, strain into fermenter, add yeast, wait and plan the next brew. Which will be another saison pitched directly onto the same yeast trub, but this time using pilsner malt & extract (with a touch of wheat for body) with the same hop schedule. Will be interesting to compare the two side by side...
The dominant factor in a Wit beer is the use of wheat, so my grain bill was
2.5kg malted wheat
1kg pale malt
0.5kg Munich malt
but my hop schedule was more akin to a saison or an American pale
50g Northern brewer (60 min)
45g Saaz (30 min)
45g EK Goldings (5 mins)
Because of the small proportions of my brewpot I've decided to give up trying to max out the sugars in an all-grain brew and instead just add extra malt extract to hit the right gravity. So in some ways I'm doing a Brew-In-The-Bag partial mash, I think! The process was -
Mash grains in a brew bag @ 67 degrees for 1 hr
Drain & squeeze bag into the brewpot for 5 minutes or so
Put the brewpot back on the heat and sparge (ie soak) the bag in 70 degree (ish) water for 10 minutes or so before draining & squeezing
Add the sparge water to the brewpot (which was just about coming to boil)
When it comes back to the boil, throw in the 60 min hops and start the clock
Hop according to schedule, and add 1kg malt extract at around 30 minutes
Relax and have a homebrew
You need to be careful adding the hops to a near-boiling mix as the extra surface area you're introducing to the liquid gives lots of nucleation sites - ie points for a boil to spontaneously occur. In real terms that means that after you throw your hops in and without changing the heat your pot will go from this
After that it's business as usual - cool, strain into fermenter, add yeast, wait and plan the next brew. Which will be another saison pitched directly onto the same yeast trub, but this time using pilsner malt & extract (with a touch of wheat for body) with the same hop schedule. Will be interesting to compare the two side by side...
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