Brew #4: Hefeweisen

On Saturday Mattox & I got together and brewed a Hefeweisen (well, we talked and drank and ate and played Katamari Damacy on Darrick's PS2 while the thing boiled). This was arguably the easiest brew I'd ever done.

There was a concern about the yeast. When we receive boxes, we never know it. We open the door and it's there. Even if we see the UPS guy pull into our circle and then drive away, we're not sure if he's delivered to us until we open the door. In any case, my kit was delivered on one of the really cold days (not the subzero ones, but the single-digit ones), and we weren't sure if it had been sitting there just that day, or for a whole day. Matt had had an issue with yeast that was delivered when it was butt-cold, and he had to head out to the brew store to pick up more when his brew wasn't fermenting. I knew that this might be an issue; if the yeast was frozen, the brew wouldn't ferment, and I wouldn't have time to go to the brew store for a week. Sure, I could have made a starter to see if it was alive, but I couldn't find the starter kit, and was too lazy to look it up.

In any case, the brew: this was an extract kit for a Hefeweisen (a German Wheat beer). And that's all it was. Literally, the entire package was six pounds of Bavarian Wheat Dry Malt Extract, and a half ounce of hops. No grains, nothing else. So, all I needed to do was boil the water and dump in the extract. That was an adventure all its own. For some reason, the boil didn't evaporate the water as expected, so dumping in six pounds of powdered malt was too much mass for the size of pot I have (and keep in mind, this is a big pot). I ended up dumping it all over the stove, much to the annoyance of my lovely wife, and had to get another pot to boil the overflow. There was a brief panic situation as we scrambled to clean the stove, and the brew boiled on.

Eventually, when both pots had boiled down a bit, I dumped the excess from little pot back into big pot, and got everything underway. It was still too much for the fermenter, so I left a bit of the brew in the pot to be dumped. Good thing, too. There's certainly nothing wrong with the yeast, as this was my first brew to spew out of the fermenter. Yep, the fermentation was so vigorous that there was some crap that had come out of the fermenter and plopped on the carper. Coulda been worse. It's in a closet and the only coat that got a little on it was the sleeve of my raincoat. Having a bit of a mess on a closet floor isn't a big deal, especially because it appears to have cleaned up well.

So this was a messy, albeit crazy easy brew. So far, brewing has been sort of like making Easy Mac. I get everything measured out in a bag, and I follow the directions. Easy to the point of silliness (OK, it's a little more difficult than Easy Mac, but it's still pretty basic). I think the next step is to find a recipe from Zymurgy (the magazine of the American Homebrewer's Association), and follow that, getting the components individually. I might still do a couple more kits, but I think it's time to graduate to the next level perhaps a kit that takes a little more work than just the regular brew. I'm not ready for all-grain, but maybe that will come in the next couple years.

Oh, and for those who care (and for posterity), the original gravity was approximately 1.038.