With the hefeweizen almost ready to drink and the Tumbler sitting patiently in the secondary, we brewed our third batch of home brew - a clone of Weihenstephaner's outstanding dunkelweizen. We decided to go for a two gallon batch size this time. Unfortunately they don't make two gallon glass carboys, so it meant buying a second one gallon carboy and the secondary fermentation will just be split between the two carboys. I saw someone at the home brew store with a rewards card, so I asked about it and signed up. If only they had told me about it from the start, I would have already racked up some $10 off coupons!
The dunkelweizen brew day was easily the most fun of the three so far. For starters, it was our first Friday brew day, so there was less of a time crunch since we didn't have to wake up at 4 the next day. And, we had family over for dinner and beer beforehand, and to hang out and help with the whole brewing process!
We started the brew day with steeping the specialty grains at 150 for 30 minutes. While we were waiting for the water to come up to temperature, I noticed a few bugs walking around the grain steeping bag. I think they must have come from the grains we got from the home brew store! I got rid of the few bugs I saw, and couldn't find any more in the grains. I'm not sure if there were more in there, but at the very least the grain wasn't teeming with them. Nobody else seemed concerned, so into the water it went.
While the grains were steeping in about a gallon of water, I realized that we didn't measure out and mark the target pre-boil volume of 3.5 gallons. We had to just eyeball it between the 3 and 4 gallon marks on the kettle.
At the end of the steep, we poured a gallon of hot water through the grain bag to get the last bits of sugar, then added the extract and boiling water to get up to the pre-boil volume. Between the hotter water and the smaller batch size, it definitely came up to boil quicker than the last batch.
After 60 minutes we were only down to about 3 gallons instead of the 2.78 we were shooting for. I think we didn't have a vigorous enough boil and then fell short of our estimated boil-off rate. During the boil I had to run out and get two big bags of ice. Remembering to get the ice for each batch is a pain, plus cooling with the ice bath takes a solid 20+ minutes, so I'm wondering if it won't be long before we spring for a wort chiller of some kind.
After cooling and then siphoning to the fermenter, we had a trub loss of 0.4 Gal (more than the 0.3 we estimated) and still came in comfortably over our target batch size of 2.37 Gal. The gravity reading of 1.052 was a little less than the 1.056 we were shooting for, presumably because of the extra water.
The dunkelweizen has now been in the primary for a little over a day, and the airlock is bubbling like crazy. I'm hoping the timing works out that we can rack to the secondary on the same day that we taste the hefeweizen. Our dunkel brewing helpers will be over to taste the hefe and I'm sure they'd have fun participating in the next step of the dunkel as well.
Weihenstephaner Dark/Dunkelweizen clone attempt recipe:
Batch size: 2.37 Gal
Batch size: 2.37 Gal
OG: 1.056
FG: 1.014
ABV: 5.52%
IBUs: 14.0
Color: 19.4 SRM
0.48 lbs Caramel/Crystal 60 malt
0.36 lbs Honey malt
0.30 lbs Special B malt
2.82 lbs Wheat dry extract
13.4 g Hallertauer hops (4.1% alpha acid) @ 60 mins
0.4 tsp irish moss @ 15 mins
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