Hi all,
In this post I’m going to go through a brew day I recently had where I brewed a strawberry wheat beer. It was a lesson for sure that day and I hope you find it a good journey as I explain what went well and what didn’t go quite to plan on the day.
Last Week In New Beerginnings
This past week I have been fairly quiet on the brewing side of things other than preparing for this brew day by getting in early and buying the ingredients/equipment a little early as I knew the shop wouldn’t be open on the day I was planning to brew.
I am also planning my next brews, they will be intended for Christmas consumption and will be:
- The same Pilsner I made for the first Brew Day post with a slight change to Tettnang hops instead of Saaz.
- A pale ale that I haven’t been able to resist the small batches of even thought they’re not ready. It’s Cascade and Centennial so you know it’s good!
I’ll be waiting until mid-October or so until an order hopefully comes in for some more SS Brewtech Brewbuckets that I’ve had my eye on and order in for at Hoppy Days for a while now as there has been a massive backlog of orders in the factory where they’re made in the US, limiting supply to near extinction down here in Aus.
I’ll do the Pilsner first off when it arrives and hopefully by the time the Pilsner is done we will be closer to Christmas and it will be perfect timing to brew the Pale Ale. All going well they should be ready at about the same time, just in time for “testing” by the whole family!
For now, onto this week’s brew…
UPDATE: I’ve kept this post here as it is definitely one of my bigger lessons I’ve learned and I’m updating it with the rest of the story since it was brewed. This beer frankly didn’t turn out as good as I’d hoped. There were nowhere near enough strawberries and as a result I had a beer that was not fruity enough to be nice but not plain enough to enjoy as the base beer itself. Since it was already carbonated, in a keg and I didn’t have anything that I could fake a keg hop with strawberries with I chose instead to drink as much of it as I could stand and inevitably dump most of it.
This was still a great lesson as next time I do a strawberry wheat beer or sour I’ll know I need to add at least double or triple the amount of strawberries I did with this brew.
This Week’s Brew – Strawberry Wheat
What Should I Brew
I have been contemplating which beers I should make for my family’s Christmas this year. I wanted to try a few different recipes but didn’t necessarily want a whole batch of them so I purchased a smaller fermenter to allow me to experiment a little more then tweak and scale up the recipes if I liked them.
The first test batch was a lower gravity session pale ale. I didn’t document this beer but it was moderately hopped with cascade and centennial to around 40 IBU’s then dry hopped fairly aggressively. It smells fantastic! When it’s ready I’ll post a photo. The only issue with this is that I changed up my current equipment (a Grainfather) for my old stovetop BIAB and it turned out to be far more efficient than I remember. I estimated a 3.5-4% ABV on this beer but it ended up closer to 5%! Oh well, it’s not a session pale but it’s a damn good pale, it stays!
Now onto this week’s beer, this was the other option for a lighter beer originally for Christmas but I found out after I planned it that nobody was super keen on the idea so I would just brew this one for myself as a test regardless.
Recipe Creation
I’m sure many of you readers, especially the ones in Australia are aware of the issue with Strawberries at the moment. For those who aren’t it’s basically a literal needle in a haystack situation. The story goes that a disgruntled employee of a major strawberry grower that supplies many large supermarkets nationwide with strawberries began putting sewing needles into strawberries bound for the store shelves!
This has caused thousands of strawberries to be dumped by the truckload, wasting entire crops. It’s a stupid act by someone who just doesn’t think or care about the consequences of their actions.
The other side to this coin is the supermarkets, they want to continue supporting the farmers in their supply chain so are continuing to sell strawberries at a phenomenally reduced price. You can get a tray of strawberry punnets for as little as a few dollars in some places.
Now I like to think of myself as someone that wants to support the little guy or people in need so I took it upon myself to buy some of these strawberries and come up with a way to use them.
There are many ways to go about this but most have their downfalls:
– Strawberry Cider….don’t like cider that much.
– strawberry blonde…a good choice but I wanted to really show off the colour and beautifully delicate flavour of these strawberries so a blonde may be even too much.
– strawberry sour…next time, not for this brew due to the reasons listed above.
– strawberry wheat…perfect. I can think of no better way to showcase the flavour and colour of these delicious strawberries than a very light, clean wheat beer.
Recipe Breakdown
Batch size: 12L
Estimated OG -> FG: 1.045 -> 1.008
Estimated ABV: 4.85%
IBU: 18
Ingredients:
Malt:
1.23kg Pale 2-Row Malt
1.08kg Wheat Malt
200g Acid Malt
Hops:
20g Hallertau @60 minutes for about 18 IBUs
Specialty Ingredients:
500g Fresh Strawberries, boiled for 5min and puréed then cooled. Place in fermenter just before the wort.
Yeast:
SafAle US-05, half a pack
Water additions:
9g Gypsum (Calcium Sulphate)
2g Calcium Chloride
Finings:
Whirlfloc, 1/4 tablet at 15mins
Equipment + Setup
For this brew I decided to use the Grainfather for the sake of convenience. It being only a half batch however, there were not enough grains to use the basket as intended. You would either take a hit on efficiency or have to use more grains. To combat this I purchased the Grainfather Micro Pipework that allows either low gravity or lower volume batches to be done without the issues mentioned above.
While the strike water was heating up I began chopping up strawberries and heating some water to make the purée. In hindsight now I wish I would have added more strawberries to get an even better colour but I am still happy with the results so far. Once the purée was made I put it in the freezer to cool down. Once the beer was ready
a few hours later it was just cool and perfect to put into the fermenter.
Mash
For this recipe I wanted a nice light-bodied beer, so that generally means a well modified grain and a mash rest that gets a good mix between the alpha and beta amylase enzymes. I chose a middle of the road 65 degrees C for an hour, ramping up to a 75 degree C mash out for 10 minutes.
During the Mash the Grainfather constantly recirculates the wort to keep an even temperature. If you do not have a setup that does this it may be wise to stir the mash occasionally, measure the temperature frequently and adjust the temp as required to stay within your range.
Boil
The boil for this brew was very simple with just one hop addition at 60 minutes and the whirlfloc at the end. It was largely uneventful. Until it came to whirlpooling and this next step.
Cooling
After the boil I typically do a whirlpool in an effort to keep as much trub in the middle as possible so that the Grainfather can filter from the side up to the Counterflow Chiller.
This is a very uneventful process unless, like me in this brew, you stir too vigorously and too close to the filter and you knock it off its post!
This is what happened to me and I knew instantly that I had screwed it up, let’s call it screw up #1. Now there’s no way I’m sticking my arm into boiling wort to put a filter back on, even with rubber gloves the heat would be too much.
I decided, not thinking clearly in my desperate state, to give the pump a try anyway. This, it turns out was screw up #2, within 30 seconds the pump clogged and I was barely getting a trickle out of it.
What I eventually decided to do, again, against my better judgement and knowing that it was not at all the correct practice. Was get a drill powered pump and manually pump the wort directly into my fermenter hot and let it chill as quickly as possible in the freezer. It took 4 hours to cool down to pitching temp but is showing no signs of infection so far but is bubbling away nicely!
Pitching Yeast
Again, a fairly uneventful step as I’m using half (which I guessed as I poured it) a packet of US-05. No starter, no rehydration, just straight in.
Next Steps
It will now stay in primary with the strawberries for around a week or until I reach the expected finishing gravity, at which point I’ll cold crash at 1 degree C for 3 days and bottle with dextrose as my bulk priming sugar.
Conclusion
The only conclusion I can draw from this so far is…
DON’T WHIRPOOL SO HARD YOUR FILTER FALLS OFF!
But really, this was a good experience to have but also a very important one to share with all of you. People who run home brewing websites tend to be looked on as people that never mess up, never get fermentation issues, stuck sparges, equipment failures etc. I think this may be in part because they carefully curate the information they share. The other side to that though is that possibly because they know they are sharing it, they tend to document, and hence think about the entire process in great detail, which leads to preparedness and fewer mistakes.
When brewing, you will screw up, somehow or somewhere along the way it will happen and we need to not be precious about it but learn from it. When I screwed this up the other day I was furious with myself thinking the post was ruined and I wouldn’t have anything for you guys but then I thought “Why not post it?” And have turned it into a lesson for myself. I can confidently say that I will never whirlpool so hard that I knock the filter off again!…..I hope.
Cheers, until next time,
Sean
If you have any feedback or edit suggestions for this post please contact us and let us know. We want to ensure the correct information is presented in the best possible way so that fellow brewers can stay well-informed.
Want to stay up to date with the latest from Sean and New Beerginnings? Like us on Facebook and Instagram or reach out to us on Reddit.
New Beer-ginnings 