Beer Forum

I brewed a 10-gal batch of wheat beer intending to split the batch in two and pitch half with a hefe yeast and the other half with a kolsch yeast. My goal, make a bavarian hefe and american wheat with the same recipe.

My brew day went well until I got to chilling my wort. It was a little warm and the hose/immersion chiller would only get the wort down to about 80-F. Other than the immersion chiller and the hose I had no other way to chill it down; my boil kettle is to wide to fit in my tub, so a ice bath was out of the question. I figured my options were to let it sit overnight (I don't have an extra fridge, so I turned the AC down in the house--65-F in the brew room; my wife hates it!) or pitch on the really warm side and hope for the best. I chose the later. The hefe yeast had no problems and kicked off like a champ. The kolsch yeast didn't do anything. After attempting to rouse the kolsch yeast (re-aeriating the beer and shaking the carboy to ensure the yeast was in suspension), I gave up and repitched. But, I didn't have any more kolsch yeast, but I did have an english ale yeast. So that's what I used.

End result: 5-gal of kick-ass hefe and 5-gal of something that has esters like an ESB but is lacking in hop aroma, flavor, and bitterness; the beer is about 18 IBU.

Is there anyway I can kick up the hop aroma, flavor, and bitterness of the english hefe? I've thought about dry hopping with fuggles or EKG and adding some iso-alpha hop extra for bitterness, but that still leaves out flavor.

Any suggestions?

Morebeer sells hop bitterness extract. I have never used it before, though.

Also, try throwing an oz of leaf hops in your corny as a dry hop (use a sanitized hop bag so it won't clog everything up.)

Try the dry hop bag thing, there was a post a while ago about using those little tea ball hanger thingies. I would try that route. It sems like it would be easier to clean and sanitize a little stainless mesh ball than a mesh bag. my .02 worth

Boiling a hop bag only takes a few minutes. Weight it down with stainless steel plumbing parts helps, too.

One other thing to try for more flavor is hop tea.

Bring a quart of water up to a boil.
Turn off the heat.
Add about an oz or so of aroma hops.
Let it sit for a few (10-15) mins with no heat.
Cool, strain, and add it into your carboy (secondary), bottling bucket, or keg.

BDawg wrote:One other thing to try for more flavor is hop tea.

Not being patient enough to wait for the hop extract to arrive from B3, I took BDawg's suggestion and decided to push it a bit.

I did a 60-minute boil hop tea w/0.5oz fuggle for 60-minutes, 0.5oz Williamete for 20-minutes, and 0.5oz fuggle for 5-minutes and added it to the fermented beer; total water was 16oz post boil.

I figured the hops using the original recipe and adding the hops. I then calculated the hops alone for 16oz. I figure that this probably took the beer from 18IBUs to about 32IBUs for a beer that started at 1.046 and finished at 1.010.

Will let you know the end result.