Brew #38: Citrus Grisette

This is an interpretation of an old Belgian beer style called Grisette. It is generally considered to be a low-alcohol version of a saison. In fact this one is quite similar to a witbier, as you can see from the recipe. The Grisettes generally have less wheat in them than in this recipe. All the witbiers I've made so far have had dried bitter orange peel and sweet orange peel in them. This time I wanted to experiment with zest from fresh lemon and lime.

I'm still struggling to get a proper mash efficiency when brewing witbiers. This time I mashed all the raw wheat with 1/3 pilsner malts for about 20 minutes. Then I boiled the mix for about 20 minutes to gelatinize the wheat before dumping it into the mash tun with the rest of the malts. Still, the mash efficiency of 64% is much better than the 55% got the last time when I did not boil. It does indeed look like it pays for itself to boil the mix.

The batch was brewed 2006-12-10.

Style:
Grisette
Type:
All grain, batch sparge
Colour:
6 EBC (Pale yellow)
Bitterness:
14 IBU
Malts:
3000g Pilsner malt
3000g Raw wheat kernels
Mash:
64C, 60 min
76C, 10 min (mashout)
64% efficiency
Spices:
zest from 1 lemon
zest from 1 lime
15 g coriander seeds
15 black pepper corns
Hops:
50g Tettnanger pellets 2.7%, 60 min
20g Tettnanger pellets 2.7%, 15 min
Yeast:
White Labs WLP 400 Belgian Wit, best before 2006-09-16, 1 liter starter
Boil:
90 min
OG: 1.045 FG: 1.011 (estimated)