Batch# 19 – Belgian Wit – Allagash White clone

Date	Brew:5/09/2014	Rack:5/23/2014	Bottle:6/10/2014
Days	0	14	32

Recipe:

From Extreme Brewing p138

 

Goals:

Chris and his wife really love Allagash, and he’s had good luck with this recipe before. Ross wants to start enjoying wheat beers. Maybe we’ll all end up happy!

Brew Notes:

	OG	FG	ABV
Recipe	1.000	1.000	0.0%
Recorded	1.000	1.000	0.00%

We hit 5.02 gallons! substituted 6 oz cascade for tettnang, used pepper as special spice, 15 min whirlpool at end of boil. We chilled with the wort chiller, added with with ten to go. Cooldown took 26 minutes to get to 80. We used the spigot to go from kettle into biab bag, and then into fermenter bucket. We used bag for hops and spices. There was considerable hot break, some of which was caught in the biab bag. We started with 6 gallons of water, and boiled off 1 gal in 75 minutes. We used 1 campden tablet added at first water to remove chloramines. The extreme brewing book had different recipes on right and left hand side. I went with the left side mostly. 

Yeast:

Belgian Wit Ale (White Labs #WLP400) 

Starter:

2.5 cup starter started 24 hours in advance. used a big mason jar as a container.

Fermentation notes:

This beer is supposed to get a good bit of flavor from the yeast. Clove, pepper, bubblegum, and banana are all possible. We waited until spring was officially over so that we could get a little warmer for the yeast to be able to do its job. We may have waited too long since we don’t have any temp control.

Bottling notes:

Label

Tasting notes:

At bottling there was a strong vinyl-like flavor. This is almost certainly caused by the yeast being too warm during the first few days. It seems to have faded a bit as the beer ages and carbs up, but this one may take a while to balance out.

The vinyl flavor seems like it may be Chlorophenol, but the funny thing is that I added a campden tablet to the pre-boil water in order to clean up the chloramines. I don’t know what to think now.

Conclusion:

We need to work on temp control, or at the very least temp monitoring so that we can pick appropriate beers for our environment. While this beer is supposed to have some yeast character, I’m starting to think that even our cleaner us-05 beers will benefit from a more controlled temperature.

Next time we should boil for 60 minutes, follow recipe on hops and spices, but add the majority of the malt at the end. The color shifted significantly through the boil, down to a dark brown color.