Weihenstephan Weizen Clone

Teufels

Wheat beer is something I’ve always been a massive fan of, so naturally when I started brewing a decent wheat beer recipe was something that was high on my list of things to have a go at. I think my third brew was the Northern Brewer wheat beer kit and that actually produced very drinkable results. So much so that I made it a second time! Once I made the move to all grain, I tried the Paulaner clone from a clone recipe book but to be honest it wasn’t great, so when I came across this recipe online I thought it was about time to give it another dig.

GRAIN BILL

What then followed was by far and away the longest and worst brew day I have had in my 2 year brewing career! The recipe called for a two step mash, the first at 45°C for 40 minutes then it wanted a double decoction which to be honest I planned to ignore and just do another 55 minutes at 65°C before mashing out at 78°C. Pretty straightforward you might think. But it was anything but!

Well, the first step was fine, but as I was heating the mash up to 65° the Klarstein cut out with an error message claiming that it was dry (when clearly it wasn’t!). It took me a little while to figure out that there was something caked on the bottom so I made the decision to try and drain the mash and see what was going on.

What was going on was that there was a thick layer of cement like sludge across the baseplate which was so thick it was causing the Klarstein to think it was dry. After a little bit of swearing and some cleaning, the mash was reintroduced and brought back up to the temperature we were looking for. And the mash was then completed without further incident.

After some recirculation (possibly not enough) and a bit of a sparge it was time to bring things up to a boil. But the Klarstein had other plans! Once we got to 77° it cut out again. This time with a full 35 litres of hot sticky liquid to deal with. Had I not already activated the yeast packs I would probably have given up at this stage. But I dislike waste so that wasn’t an option.

Literally every pot, pan, mixing bowl I own was filled with wort and covered every inch of my tiny kitchen work surfaces. Grumpiness levels were high at this stage! The baseplate clean again, I decided to reintroduce the wort by filtering it through my mash bag folded over a bunch of times. Finally, we got to the boil. And to be honest, things went reasonably smoothly from thereon in, although I missed the target gravity by a full point.

The Wyeast Weihenstephan Weizen yeast goes like an absolute train, and fortunately, recalling that the Northern Brewer kits were enthusiastic fermenters, I decided not to take any chances and used a blow off tube for both fermenters. Even with the blow off tube the krausen was trying to escape from under the FV lids!

All in all brew day was about 9 hours, before clean up time at the end. That’s basically double my normal brew day! I thought I would drop the guys at Geterbrewed an email to ask what they thought might have caused the issue, as I wondered whether there might be an issue with the crush because of what I assumed was wheat flour caking the bottom of the all in one.

Hats off to the guys at GEB because not only is the stuff they sell top notch, but their service is too. I got a call from a Belfast number the following day and had a really useful chat with a chap whose name escapes me now! Anyway, his diagnosis was a stuck sparge and he recommended that I use rice hulls in future due to wheat grains not having the same structure as your normal malt grains.

As the recipe I was trying to follow called for the addition of speise (unfermented wort) after 4 days, I enquired whether using spray malt would suit, and also be able to deal with correcting the gravity. His view was that that would work just fine, so that’s what I did. You can see the spike on the graph from the iSpindel, although what that means in terms of calculating the actual strength of the beer, I have no clue. And to be honest, I’m not sure I really care!

So after 8 days fermenting behind the sofa, it spent the next couple of weeks in the garage (recipe wanted it at 5°C for a couple of weeks and as we were in a cold snap that seemed the ideal place) before I bottled it ten days or so ago. Incredibly, it actually tasted pretty good so I’m looking forward to trying it once it’s had chance to carbonate fully.

After this experience it might be another 18 months before I have the mental fortitude to have another go at brewing another wheat beer! And that brings us nicely to the name. As I was bottling it I was trying to come up with something that really expressed how I felt about it, and with it being a German style wheat beer it should really have some sort of Teutonic slant. Teufels Arsch Wasser (devil’s arse water) was where I got to, although that’s a bit of a mouthful so Matt suggested just shortening it to Teufels. So that’s what I did!