It is (was) the holiday season, and given my lenghtly break from work, I made sure to lock down an afternoon for beer. The day started early, and I bottled the graf we brewed back in November. Bottling is always a pain, and the prolonged sanitation cycle of the dishwasher pushed brew day into the afternoon. But, once things got rolling the brew moved along pretty well.
I'm headed to Europe as part of my honeymoon, and Germany (among other beer countries) is one of our stops. To get me prepped for my trip, I decided to try my hand at one of the regional beers.
In search of inspiration, I stopped by The Heidelberg, Ann Arbor's go-to German restaurant. The Heidelberg is a great place for a wiener schnitzel & spaetzle dinner, but its also the home of the beer boot. My favorite beer, which had surprisingly been taken off the taps, was their dunkelweizen. It was dark and full, but still wheaty and delicious. I'm also on a clove tear at the moment due to it being glögg season and all, but more about clove in the recipe page though. Since my dunkleweizen source had dried up, it was up to me, to brew up its replacement.
During this session, I really tried to focus on increasing my mash efficiency and hitting a proper OG, but I based the recipe on my low efficiency metric just to hedge my bets. I boosted the water:grain ratio for this mash by a significant margin, hit and maintained mash targets well (thanks to some on the spot decoctions), and I sparged very slowly. I wasn't able to lauter at as high as a temperature as I'd like, but due to my other efforts I actually overshot my OG by a fairly large margin. According to BJCP, I was .004 too high on my OG, but I'm going to let it slide.
I'm going to let this fermentation run for a while, but hope to have a drinkable beer by mid-Feb.
LINKS
I'm headed to Europe as part of my honeymoon, and Germany (among other beer countries) is one of our stops. To get me prepped for my trip, I decided to try my hand at one of the regional beers.
In search of inspiration, I stopped by The Heidelberg, Ann Arbor's go-to German restaurant. The Heidelberg is a great place for a wiener schnitzel & spaetzle dinner, but its also the home of the beer boot. My favorite beer, which had surprisingly been taken off the taps, was their dunkelweizen. It was dark and full, but still wheaty and delicious. I'm also on a clove tear at the moment due to it being glögg season and all, but more about clove in the recipe page though. Since my dunkleweizen source had dried up, it was up to me, to brew up its replacement.
During this session, I really tried to focus on increasing my mash efficiency and hitting a proper OG, but I based the recipe on my low efficiency metric just to hedge my bets. I boosted the water:grain ratio for this mash by a significant margin, hit and maintained mash targets well (thanks to some on the spot decoctions), and I sparged very slowly. I wasn't able to lauter at as high as a temperature as I'd like, but due to my other efforts I actually overshot my OG by a fairly large margin. According to BJCP, I was .004 too high on my OG, but I'm going to let it slide.
I'm going to let this fermentation run for a while, but hope to have a drinkable beer by mid-Feb.
LINKS
No comments:
Post a Comment