Wittebrew

So today was a brewday, I was planning on brewing 5 gallons of a Wit but I didn't have enough flaked white wheat to make 5 gallons. So that kind of sucks but again I didn't have a way to serve 5 gallons yet, and you all know how I feel about bottling beer.

So here's the recipe:

1.10 kg Pilsener Malt
1 kg Flaked soft White wheat
.3 kg rice hulls (cause of the wheat!!)
.27 kg flaked oats
70 g Munich Malt

So that's the malt bill or the mash. I only ran the Pilsener and munich malt through the mill, not sure if you have to mill the soft wheat or not. My thought was that the wheat would be ground up too much and might clog the mill wheels. I mashed in at 50 C and let it circulate through the HERMS coil for 15 mins. I then raised the temp to 67 C, but started the 60 minute timer when the temperature hit 63 C. After that I raised the temperature to 77 C for mash out and let that circulate for 30 mins. Meanwhile I had another 10 L of water warming up to 77 C for the sparge water, I batch sparge. So once the first running's were drained down I added the sparge water and let it circulate for 10 mins to clear. Then I ran the sparge water off and started up the boil.

Stuff added to the boil was:

13 G Hallertau hops
7 G Crushed coriander seed
2 G dried chamomile flower
20 G fresh orange zest

So I did a 90 min boil with the hop addition at 60 mins. With 15 mins left I added a pinch of irish moss. At 5 mins I added the rest of the ingredients. Once the boil was over I circulated through the chiller plate for 10 mins to sanitize it, and to help settle the trub in the kettle. After filling the fermenter to 11.5 L I injected the wort with pure oxygen for 20 seconds, then pitched a fresh smack pack of yeast.

So my efficiency taken from the kettle was 82% which was bang on for what I was aiming for, this has been my system efficiency for the last 4 brews. I had initially set it to 75% but it always worked out to 82% so that's where I set it to. Thing is my OG's are coming in a tad low, like this one should have come out as 1.050 after the boil but it was actually only 1.044. I gotta figure this out cause it bugs me coming in low, but the pre-boil efficiency is bang on.

So from the first taste the coriander levels seemed to be bang on to me and the orange was nice also. The chamomile is alright I guess I can't seem to taste it all that much. I guess I will have to pass it around to see how people like it. Oh I am fermenting it at 18 C.

If you want pictures in the future posts of my system and some of the steps let me know in the comments below.