I finally got around to brewing another batch of beer last week. My brother in law Scott and I sat down with a 6 pack of Weisse beers and brewed a Weizenbeir using another brew kit from Brewer’s Best, this time we took some major liberties with the beer though and I am excited and scared to see how it is going to turn out.
The kit we used contained 6.6lbs of Wheat LME, 1oz. of Mount Hood bittering hops, .5oz of Mount Hood aroma hops, and then some priming sugar. The instructions called for a 2.5 gallon boil for the wort, but we upped it an entire gallon to increase help increase the IBUs as we also added another full ounce of German Hallertau hops to give it a nice bitter flavor and hoppy aroma. We added the 1st ounce of hops at the beginning of the boil, then added a half ounce at 20 minute intervals.
Now you think that would probably have been enough for two guys only doing there second brew ever, messing with IBUs and hops that we know very little about could potentially change the entire structure of a beer that isn’t specifically a hoppy style. But we decided to go big or go home and also added a tablespoon of coriander to the wort during the last 10 minutes of the boil.
Now we have hopped up this beer and added some extra spice to try and drag some extra flavor out of the low alcohol low IBU brew, but we weren’t finished there. The same time we added the coriander we took it up a notch and added some yellow bell pepper to the boil as well.
Scary. Why? Because vegetal flavors in beer are often considered bad.
Most times they are associated with DMS or Dimethyl Sulfides which produces a cooked corn or celery like flavor in beer from a bacterial infection. So DMS = Bad. But this isn’t a case of DMS this is a case of extracting some of the sweet like pepper qualities out of the yellow bell pepper and giving a hint of it to the beer. The problem is, I don’t know anybody that has done it before and I don’t know how it is going to taste. The bigger problem is that when I pulled a taster off of the primary fermentation before moving it to secondary the pepper taste was huge. I can only hope that as the beer finishes in secondary and after the priming sugar is added the pepper taste will be cut a little, or I will be dumping 48 bottles of beer down the drain.
The good news, I learned a lot with this brew session. I learned about DMS which I wouldn’t have until later in the future. I learned that when most people brew with peppers they roast them and add them in a dry hopping fashion and not during the boil. I also learned that we are not completely incompetent as we had no problems brewing this time. We didn’t have any boil overs, temperature issues, and our original gravity came out right on target at 1.046.
Brewing so far has been a lot of fun. It allows you to be creative while learning and the end result is awesome. Even if it has to be dumped. I hope that isn’t the case for this “crazy” beer, but even if it is I am satisfied with the process. I will let you know how it tastes when I bottle it in a week and a half.
