For our first home brew, we decided to shoot for something along the lines of a Weihenstephaner Hefeweizen. After poking around for recipes online for a bit, it seemed like it was basically just wheat extract, hallertauer hops, and weihenstephan yeast. We used BeerSmith to figure out the quantities of extract and hops to use to get the desired original gravity and IBUs.
The first thing we did on brew day was run a test boil for an hour with our new brew kettle. BeerSmith has a place for incorporating the boil-off rate into the calculations, and I figured getting this drastically wrong one way or the other would mean we'd miss our target gravity and IBUs. After all the testing and guessing, we were shooting for a pre-boil volume of 2.26G, a batch volume of 1.22G, for a final volume in the carboy of 1.05G. The carboy volume was the critical part here, because too little beer in the carboy would mean too much air, which could increase the chances of contamination.
Time to start brewing! We measured out 2.26G of water, got it boiling, got our ingredients measured out, and threw the wheat extract and hops in there. It kind of tried to boil over when we added the extract. In retrospect, we should have turned off the heat, then added the ingredients, then brought it back to a boil.
The boil smelled just like Flying Barrel. We were actually brewing beer in our own house! After 60 minutes, we were only down to about 2 gallons instead of 1.5. We let it go another 15 minutes to boil of some more, but we still didn't get down to the target post-boil volume. I think part of this is because the boil off is slower with a bunch of malt extract in the water than it is with just water. Plus, the 2.26 gallon pre-boil volume should have been with the extract, not 2.26 gallons of just water and then extract on top of that. Next time we'll add the extract then add more water to bring it up to the desired volume.
During the boil, we got everything sanitized and ready to go. We put the kettle in ice water in the kitchen sink to cool it down after the boil (we should have bought more ice), then siphoned the wort into the fermenting bucket, pitched the yeast, put on the lid, and put on the airlock.
We got an original gravity of 1.058, which was actually slightly higher than the 1.054 we were shooting for, despite using too much water. So it was a relief that the water difference didn't mess us up. We put the bucket down in the basement, which stays about 64 degrees, and the brew day was done!
---> [ Hefeweizen Rack to Secondary ]
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