The Brewery
We’ve got a couple new beers coming up here. In this photo we’ve got a Hefeweizen and a Nut Brown Ale in the carboy’s. The Hefeweizen(on the left) was kegged this past Thursday. The Nut Brown will be kegged in a couple of weeks. The Hefeweizen came out with an ABV of 5.5%. Right on target. A Hefeweizen is an unfiltered “wheat” beer. “Hefe” means with yeast which can attribute to its cloudy look. They usually come out with a gold color and cloudy. Hints of banana’s and sometimes even bubble gum are evident. Ours came out a little darker then we thought and maybe a bit too much sediment. Although I think the darker color makes the beer seem much more cloudy then it really is. I also think the darker color comes with the use of Malt Extract. I gave it a shot a couple of days into carbonation. Not bad. The first sip had a definite taste of what a wheat beer should be. A few more days of carbonation and it should be great.
We’ve had constant problems with carbonation levels. Our Porter was under carbonated and flat. Most of our other beers seem over charged and come out very foamy. We’ve tried force carbonation. Jack up the pressure, roll the keg around on the ground for 5 minutes, and in theory it should be good to go within a couple days. Its been a constant battle for us. We have now kegged I think around 10 batches of beer, and only two came out ok. Those were our Witbier and our Belgian Tripel. I was doing some research and I found a great way to get proper carbonation levels. VOLUMES!! I learned of a way to determine proper setup by finding out how many volumes of CO2 that type of beer would use. There are charts that give you a volume going by serving temperature and CO2 pressure. Correlate that with what volume that type of beer has and bingo.
ALL GRAIN IS COMING!! We were talking today about what we need to buy. I was scouring the internet last night looking up some stuff. There are some great videos on YouTube about home brewing. We’re looking to go on the cheap. I’m just waiting for my money from Uncle Sam. I’m using almost all of it on all grain equipment. That and a counterflow filler for bottling kegged beer. The thing I am most excited about all grain brewing is creating our own recipes. We’ve got an IPA recipe we put together for extract brewing, and I can’t wait to tweak it to make it taste more authentic. In the meantime we’ll stick to extract brewing and we will be brewing a Witbier this week and should be ready around Easter.
