Orangegaarden Belgian Witbier

 

 

 

68 oF

Adj

Orig

Alcohol

SPGR

1.014

1.015

1.0615

6.1%

 

Ingredients

·         1 lb. Flaked Oats

·         1 lb. Wheat Liquid Malt Extract

·         1 oz Spalt Hops (Bittering Hops 60 min)

·         1 oz Spalt Hops (Flavoring Hops 15 min)

·         1.5 oz Cracked Coriander Seeds (15 min)

·         ½ oz Bitter Orange Peel (15 min)

·         8 oz Belgian Candi Sugar (Amber 15 min)

·         5 lb. Wheat Liquid Malt Extract (0 min)

·         2 lb Orange Blossom Honey (0 min)

·         Safbrew T-58 Dry Brewing Yeast

 

Brewers Log

 

Beer Date 05312008:   <Day 1>

“I’m not even supposed to be here today!!!” That is one of my favorite lines from the classic 1994 movie “Clerks”, and very applicable to today. I was supposed to go on a business trip to Asia and should be sipping Saki and eating sushi in Japan right now, but at T – 12 hours the trip was cancelled due to conflicts with the customers that were visiting with.

 

In an effort to make use of my weekend I decided to brew. Since I have been telling Jim for a while now that we would be a Belgian Witbier soon, I thought this might be a good time to do so. I looked around online and at a couple recopies in the brew store and decided mix things up a bit. That’s right, were going off the reservation with this batch. You see all the Belgian Witbier recipes seemed to have some combination of  5 key ingredients (in addition to the malt and hops)

  1. Honey
  2. Coriander Seed
  3. Orange Peel
  4. Belgian Candi Sugar
  5. Flaked Oats

 

I decided to go with a Hoegaarden clone recipe as a base, but to integrate all the ingredients. I talked with the gentleman at the brew supply placed to get some suggestions because I wanted to make sure we had a good balance of everything.  It got somewhat complicated due to the absence of the types of hops that I was supposed to use, but we were able substitute with something similar. Oh and we mixed things up a bit with a completely different type of yeast. This is a powdered yeast that should give it a spicy peppery flavor. Not sure what it will taste like, but what the heck.

 

Oh yeah, and I decided to use my outside burner today. A few months back I picked up one of those kits to fry a turkey, but never felt like actually using it. Today it is pretty hot and I didn’t fell like unnecessarily heating up the house.

 

Washed out brew pot and threw filled with 2 gallons of  bottled spring water.

Fired up the burner and got the water started. I didn’t time it, but in a very short period of time it was up to 180oF. Oops, at least I didn’t put the grains in yet.

 

My target temperature for steeping the oats is 151oF. I was told that 150oF - 152oF was the best range to extract the enzymes form the oats that will add more fermentable sugars. Hotter temp will give it more body and a thicker head, but I wanted to shoot for the alcohol content.

 

So I had to let it cool down. It took forever to cool down, I eventually filled the sink with water and transferred the pot to the sink. That cooled it down in no time.

Poured the oats into a muslin sock and dropped into the pot.

·         1 lb. Flaked Oats

This was a bit of a learning experience as it was very difficult to keep the temp below 152oF. It kept popping up too high and I had to pull it off and cool down. I eventually moved it inside and let it sit in my stovetop and eventually turned that on to keep it at ~150oF.

NOTE: heat to 140oF or 145oF on the outside burner and then move inside to the stovetop to the steeping of the grains. This will make it much easier to control the heat.

Once the grains were done I moved the pot back to the outside burner and fired it up. It didn’t take long at all to get the temp up nice and hot. It couldn’t have been more then 10 or 15 minutes to get the temp up to a little over 200oF.

I killed the heat and began adding the malt extract.

·         1 lb. Wheat Liquid Malt Extract

At the recommendation of the guy at the home brew store, I only added 1 lb of the extract for the full boil. The rest will be added later after the boil. This will help keep to the lighter color of a Witbier. I guess that the boil cooks the sugar and darkens the liquid, so this should help lighten the beer. I will be adding the remaining malt extract when i stop the boil, this will help to cool the wort down before the ice bat. I will also add the honey at this time, this way it wont cook off the flavor from the orange blossom honey.

As expected, the wort came to a boil very quickly once I put it back onto the heat. It slowly foamed up more, and more, and more until it was even with the top. I tried to take it off the heat but the handles were too hot and the pot holders were back in the kitchen. At the last second Dave when yelled “turn off the heat” I killed the fire and it slowly foamed down. Phew we avoided the overflow. I turned the fire back on and it just started boiling, I guess we reached the hot break point when as I killed the fire.

The recipe called for Hallertauer hops, but they didn’t have any. We tired to substitute Saaz, but that was out as well. We went with Spalt.

·         1 oz Spalt Hops (Bittering Hops)

I used the whole leaf hops (not the pellets), I like that type better for some reason.

Once there was a nice rolling boil I turned down the heat a bit and let the wort cook. I went out every few minutes to stir. The hops leaves would work their way up the side of the pot so I would take a spoon of wort and run it along the sides of the pot to drop the hops back into the wort. I hadn’t had that happen before, but I think it might be because I boiled with the lid on, I think the water boiled up higher because of that. This is the first time I used the lid during the boil. I didn’t want to leave the pot outside without being covered.

I measured out the coriander seeds and placed them in a Ziploc bag and gently rolled a rolling pin over them to crack them open. The point was to crack the shell without pulverizing it into a powder. The gentle roll didn’t seem like enough so I put a bit of pressure behind it. I was careful to not smash it up too much.

 

After 45 minutes of boiling I added a lot of ingredients.

·         1 oz Spalt Hops (Flavoring Hops)

·         1.5 oz Cracked Coriander Seeds

·         ½ oz Bitter Orange Peel

·         8 oz Belgian Candi Sugar (Amber)

The recipes called for clear candi sugar, but they didn’t have any so I bought what was available. This may make it a little darker, but oh well.

While this boiled for 15 minutes I sanitized everything and prepared the rest of the extract. The tub the extract came in was going to be difficult to get everything out of it without dipping in the wort like we have done in the past. But since we were killing the heat this was not going to work. So I sanitized a big bowl and poured all the extract and honey I could into the bowl. This way we could use a sanitized rubber spatula to scoop all the sweet goodness. In order to get the last bit from the tub I went ahead and dipped in the boiling wort (while it was still doing the boil).

After 60 minutes of boiling, I killed the flame and brought the pot inside where there is counterpace. Dave poured the remaining malt extract and honey mixture into the wort while I stirred with a sanitized whisk.

·         5 lbs. Wheat Liquid Malt Extract

·         2 lb Orange Blossom Honey

I added another gallon of water to help bring down the temp a little more then I placed the pot in the sink with 1.5 bags of ice. I didn’t time it, but it probably took ~ 20 minutes or so to get it down to 80oF.

We poured the wort into one of my sanitized buckets straining out the hops, orange peel and coriander seeds. We then added ~ 2.5 gallons of water to bring it to 5 gallons and siphoned into the 6.5 gallon carboy.

I shook the carboy to mix in a bunch of air and then I poured a bit out to take a temp and specific gravity reading.

 

75 oF

Adj

SPGR

1.060

1.0615

I am guessing that this will end up being in the 6.5% range.

Until now I have always used the prepared pitchable yeast options and I have had a strong preference for the White Labs vials over the Wyeast smack packs. But this time I went with a powdered option

·         Safbrew T-58 Dry Brewing Yeast

The little foil packet didn’t have much for directions so I pulled them from the web. http://www.fermentis.com/FO/EN/pdf/SafbrewT-58.pdf

Re-hydrate the dry yeast into yeast cream in a stirred vessel prior to pitching. Sprinkle the dry yeast in 10 times its own weight of sterile water or wort at 27C ± 3C. Once the expected weight of dry yeast is reconstituted into cream by this method (this takes about 15 to 30 minutes), maintain a gentle stirring for another 30 minutes. Then pitch the resultant cream into the fermentation vessel. Then pitch the resultant cream into the fermentation vessel. Alternatively, pitch dry yeast directly in the fermentation vessel providing the temperature of the wort is above 20C. Progressively sprinkle the dry yeast into the wort ensuring the yeast covers all the surface of wort available in order to avoid clumps. Leave for 30 minutes and then mix the wort e.g. using aeration.

I liked option B, but that wasn’t too feasible with a glass carboy, I think that was written for but buckets. So I made up my own option that was a combination of the two.  I sanitized Pyrex measuring cup and poured a couple cups of wort into it an sprinkled the powered yeast evenly across the top and let it sit for a ½ hour. It slowly absorbed the water and sunk. After a ½ hour I took a sanitized fork and stirred it in good and then poured into the carboy and shook a little more to mix in well.

Capped the carboy with a hose going into a bucket of water. This will keep air from coming up the hose into the carboy, but will allow gas to easily escape without clogging the air lock if there is a great deal of activity.

 

After some cleanup and chilling I went down the street to the local bar with some friends to check out their Rockaoke. It is like Karaoke but with the video game Rock Band. It was pretty cool, they had an elevated stage with monitors for each person (drummer, guitar, bass guitar and singer) and they pretty much just let people swap in and out of instruments as they wanted. I wasn’t feeling so musically inclined and just watched, but it was pretty cool.

 

Anyways, I got back home and it was probably about 4 hours or so after pitching the yeast, and boy was it bubbling away. Because it was powdered and not already active like the other batches I have made, I thought it was going to take a lot longer to work. I was expecting it to take a couple of days really show what was going on, but it was already going strong.

 

Beer Date 06122008:   <Day 12>

 

 

68 oF

Adj

Orig

Alcohol

SPGR

1.014

1.015

1.0615

6.1%

 

Beer Date 06142008:   <Day 14>

A couple days of the same specific gravity, bottling time.

 

 

68 oF

Adj

Orig

Alcohol

SPGR

1.014

1.015

1.0615

6.1%

 

Bottling went very well. There were no issues, the transfers were very neat and tidy with almost no spillage or waste. This batch was somewhat historical because for the first time we got the full 48 bottles.

 

Beer Date 07012008:   <Day 31>

It has been 2 weeks now and Jim, Dave and I opened up a bottle and tried it. The taste was very unique. It was a very complex blend of flavors, but it tasted a bit unbalanced. Not bad by any means, but it tasted a little off.

 

Beer Date 07032008:   <Day 33>

The unbalance of the flavors bothered me a bit. I decided to take a bottle into the guy at Homebrew Depot to see if I could get any pointers. I thought that maybe I went too wild with the sweet ingredients and needed some more hops, or perhaps a different type of hops give a better flavor. He poured a bit and sniffed a while, commenting on the color and aromas. For the most part it was appropriate for a Belgian Witbier, except for the color. The color dark L, I guess I shouldn’t have used the Amber Candi Sugar after all. Most of the characteristics were inline, but he agreed that there was a taste that is slightly off. He pulled out a pamphlet and read a couple of things and then asked if I boiled with the lid on. Amazingly I did. Turns out that boiling with the lid is on makes it too hot and this affects the chemistry of the process. I don’t understand all the details yet, but I bought a book that should help explain a lot of these types of details. He suggested a slice of orange in the glass, which is something that we had thought of trying already.