Wheat beer recipe

[booldawg]

Any input into the below before I get it on over the weekend? Its my second attempt at a wheat beer, the last one ended up crystal clear depsite 40% wheat malt (for once I didnt want a clear beer!) and hit well under my intended gravity.

This is for 23L and will be a 60 min mash/boil and be 20 IBU

3000g Lager Malt
2500g Wheat Malt
35g Hallertau - 60 mins - 13.9 IBU
20g Hallertau - 20 mins - 6.1 IBU
25g Coriander seed - 15 mins
50g Bitter Orange peel - 15 mins
WB-06 yeast

The herbs have been bought from LHBS. According to Beersmith the OG will be 1057. The last wheat beer I did was well under target. I'm not sure if wheat malt is as efficient as pale and if Beersmith allowed for this?

[Barley Water]

Just a couple of things for you to think about:

First, if doing a Wit, try throwing in about a tablespoonful of all purpose flour into the boil. You will end up with haze, just what you want (and it won't go away). Yes, you are adding starch to the beer which will not convert since all the enzymes are denatured due to the boil. Bare in mind however that back in the day, our buddies in Belgium also used unmalted wheat in their grists which is one reason the beers were so cloudy (they were leaving unconverted starches in the beer). By the way, you can also adjust your formulation to include unmalted wheat the drawback being that the stuff is like dealing with little rubber ball bearings. At some point this year, I am going to try doing a Wit with unmalted wheat which I will do a cereal mash on before adding it to the mashtun, that should prove interesting.

When messing with wheat, you have no doubt noticed that since there is no husk, the grain itself is smaller than malted barley. What I do is narrow the gap on my crusher when griding the wheat, your efficiency will go way up. Of course, this also means that you are more prone to a stuck mash, we use rice hulls over here to get around that problem. When I do German heffeweizen, my recipie is 70% malted wheat (yup, I am a traditionalist) and the rice hulls do a great job of avoiding the dreaded stuck mash.

Finally, Pierre Celis was reported to be using a little camomille along with the other spices in his Wit at both Hoogarden as well as in Austin when he had his brewery here. I don't believe he ever owned up to exactly what he was putting into the beer but it sure was good. I think Wit's are one of the more difficult styles to do well, I have had very few homebrewed examples which I thought measured up the to commercial stuff, good luck and let us know how it goes.

[booldawg]

Thanks for the pointers BW. I'm hoping to brew this on Sunday so will be interested to see how it turns out.

[yogester]

Rather than using Wheat Malt, Flaked Wheat might be more authentic (not Torrefied!!) and will give you the haze you are looking for.

[adm]

I think that it's typically Wheat Malt for a German Weiss (due to the Rheinheitsgebot laws), and unmalted Wheat for a Belgian Wit.

Maybe also drop the 20 mins hop addition entirely. The "style" calls for 10-20 IBU, so I'd probably go for 15 IBU of Hallertauer all at the start of the boil as the flavour in a Wit is meant to be all about the yeast and spices.

Also - don't make too big a yeast starter. I read that much of the yeast flavour comes from the yeast having to work a bit at the start, and if you pitch too much, it won't have to do that. I normally pitch a 2L starter from liquid yeasts, but I'm doing a Weiss over the weekend and will be using a 1L starter for that.

(EDIT - sorry - just read you are using WB06. Ignore the last comment)

[dave-o]

If it were me i would swap the lager and wheat amounts around. Wheat beers are traditionally meant to be at least 50% wheat.

But hey, you look like you know what you're doing!