Thursday, June 07, 2007

Brew #49: Witbier

Witbier is, along with IPAs, a very popular beer style in this household. It is summer afterall and I just had to make another. This time I did a few twists of the earlier recipes. The recipe was different in that it used zest from two oranges and a lemon, ground coriander from a glass, steeped chamomile tea bags and dried yeast.

Fermentis, the producer of the Safbrew S-33 dried yeast packs, seems to be recommending the yeast for Belgian wheat beers, which I can only understand to be Witbiers. This is an experimental brew, so I've gone ahead and created a Witbier with it. In theory it doesn't sound that bad. Literature I've read say that the yeast is the Edme strain, which is seems to be a British yeast strain. What its origin is I do not know. There seem to be other dried variants of this yeast strain as well.

The batch was brewed 2007-06-05.

Style:
Witbier
Type:
All grain, batch sparge
Colour:
7 EBC (Pale yellow)
Bitterness:
14 IBU
Malts:
3000g Pale malt
3000g Raw wheat kernels
500g Oatmeal
300g Dry light malt extract
Mash:
66C, 60 min
76C, 10 min (mashout)
67% efficiency
Hops:
40g Styrian Goldings pellets, 3.2%, 60 min
30g Saaz pellets, 3.3%, 15 min
Other:
10g ground coriander
2 bags of chamomile tea
zest from two oranges
zest from one lemon
Yeast:
Safbrew S-33, 1 pack, dry yeast, best before date 2008-11-01.
Boil:
90 min
OG: 1.050 FG: 1.012 (estimated) abv: 5.0%

Update: Oslo is experiencing a heat wave this week. The fermentation temperature has reached 26C during the day, and thoughout the night it falls to about 21C. The outside temperature has been in the vicinity of 30C the last few days. The primary fermentation was over after two days and the fermentation bucket now sits idle. I'll leave it there for another week before kegging. The houses here do for obvious reasons not have any air conditioning systems, so there is not really much that one can do about this other than hoping for the beer not being ruined. This weekend's double brew, a German pilsener and a Roggenbier, has been postponed until the weather returns to something more normal. In the meantime I'm enjoying the nice sunny weather on the terrace.

3 comments:

Travis said...

I didn't use a lemon in mine, but I used the sour orange peels. I also had some grains of paradise (they just sound cool).

I too love the wit in the summer.

grove said...

Did you use fresh sour orange peel (tangerine?) or the dried stuff that you can get from the LHBS? I've been using the dried orange peel in earlier batches, but have recently started experimenting with zest from fresh fruit. It seems to result in more fruity flavours. Need to do more experimentation before concluding though.

Yes, a Wit works wonders in the sun. :)

Travis said...

For this one I used the stuff in the bag, but I have used fresh orange peel before. It was great, I just sat there and peeled the orange next to the brew pot, as I got her open I threw the peel chunks in and ate the orange.

I think that there is more bang in the fresh over the dried, but with the Belgium Wit it's not easy to tell compared to if orange is the only unique flavor in a brew.

I had some folks over drinking my stuff and the comments I got were "it has a citrus flavor" but no one said orange. Where as the previous brew I used fresh orange in, I could really taste it.