#strisselspalt

Brewday - French Wheat Beer

In preparation for summer or at least a few days of sunshine between the rain, I decided that it was time to go for a new Wheat Beer recipe rather than repeating Tempus, my Lemon Thyme Witbier,  like I have the past few years. So this time I wanted to be a bit more traditional, you know me I like it old school! After a lot of research and some suggestions from Alec from Homebrew Club I took the 50% wheat recipe I had crafted and bumped it up to 75% wheat with the additional of 200g of rice hulls to prevent a stuck mash. And what can I say, it worked a treat, no problem with the mash at all. Alongside the standard Wheat Malt, was some Torrified Wheat, Flaked Wheat and I used Pilsner Malt for the remaining grist. This gave a very creamy yellow wort which was super sweet.

I used  Strisselspalt hops, one of the very few French varieties which I’d researched was used in traditional French style Wheat Beers as it packed a good aromatic punch, it has a tremendously low alpha at just 1.3%, so I used plenty, 30g for bittering, 30g for flavour and 15g for aroma. Along with late additions of 2tsp of crushed coriander seeds, a small amount of fresh coriander, 11g of Curacao bitter orange peel and a fresh clementine peel and juice. I might have underestimated the coriander seeds as the wort had a bit of a spicy kick, but it was hard to discern with the sweetness. So this could be quite a zingy summer beverage. I didn’t use any Irish moss in this one as I’m hoping to keep it cloudy like a proper Wheat Beer.

I pitched a new yeast I discovered by Wyeast called Forbidden Fruit which is supposed to emphasis the spices in the beer, all I can say so far is that it’s kicking out some serious stink. The kitchen doesn’t smell too nice, but I suppose at least this means the yeast is busy doing it’s thing, lol.