Me And The Homebrews: Kegging

Making beer is as much about taste as it is about sustenance. Beer, properly made without fillers, is like drinking a loaf of bread. It is the yield of the grain, the staff of life. What can be more basic than wheat beer?

On this edition of Me and the Homebrews, WBN chronicles the making of a Dunkelweizen, or dark wheat, beer.

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Today was kegging day. Our Dunkenweizen has matured in the primary fermenter for a week and the secondary fermenter for 4 additional weeks.

Even after moving to the second carboy, we ended up with a lot of precipitate. Check out the two inches of trub at the bottom of the carboy -- that's what we got after leaving an inch or more in the first carboy.

Still we got a nice wheaty light brown beer. We tasted it and it tastes fine: miles better than last time we did this same beer.

We currently have no CO2 to put in the keg, so the beer is essentially flat. We will rectify that soon enough. More troubling is we performed a leak test on the keg due to the problems we've been having with the pressure. Sure enough, it is not airtight at the top where the lid goes. Not sure if it is an O-ring problem or the keg itself is misshapen.

This leak is the source of the lack of pressure to be sure, and a likely candidate for contributing to the terrible taste last time. This is only the third time we've used the keg, so I don't know if it was defective from the start, since all of us drank the first batch so quickly.

This needs fixing and soon.

Keg goes in the fridge pictured in the background.

The other casualty was we broke the hydrometer while cleaning up. My bad, I put it in the brew pot which was filled with sanitizer for this operation and forgot to remove it before I moved the pot upstairs to clean. The hydrometer is filled with metal at the bottom, not mercury like a thermometer -- thank goodness!

Fortunately, we got a final gravity reading first: F.G. 1.02 (O.G. was 1.044) which gives us an ABV of 5%. That's your average beer strength and this is an average style of beer.

Dunkelweizen Act 2

Making beer is as much about taste as it is about sustenance. Beer, properly made without fillers, is like drinking a loaf of bread. It is the yield of the grain, the staff of life. What can be more basic than wheat beer?

On this edition of Me and the Homebrews, WBN chronicles the making of a Dunkelweizen, or dark wheat, beer.

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So, we decided to have a second go at the Dunkelweizen, since our first attempt was abysmal. We chose not to do the full boil of 5 gallons, and instead did 1.5 gallons on the electric range -- much faster -- and added the full amount of hops. We paid strict attention and took a triple measurement. Our O.G. was 1044 vs. a recommended 1049: a little off, but not too bad.

Reading the recipe, we realized we might have added the wheat extract at the same time as the barley extract last time. This time we added the barley fermentables at 60 minutes, and the wheat fermentables at 15 minutes like we should have.

From the blizzard it was obvious the best cooling method was pouring the hot wort into 3 gallons of chilled water and then direct immersion in the snow.

Our Wyeast, although two months past its "prime", activated just fine after 24 hours in the smack pack. Here are one billion yeast cells converting the sugars in the wort into real beer as seen by the active CO2 emission in the fermentation lock.




Next week we will rack the beer, since not doing it the last time contributed to significant off flavors.

Homebrew: Dunkelweizen Gets A Name

Making beer is as much about taste as it is about sustenance. Beer, properly made without fillers, is like drinking a loaf of bread. It is the yield of the grain, the staff of life. What can be more basic than wheat beer?

On this edition of Me and the Homebrews, WBN chronicles the making of a Dunkelweizen, or dark wheat, beer.

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Something about beer makes you think of monks and the middle ages or dark ages -- or just dark wheat beer, aka Dunkelweizen. After 1 week past Brew Day, the wort looks, er, well, it looks rather unpalatable, kind of like something that backed up a drain pipe. It's probably the cloudy milk chocolate color that does it.

But experience tells us that current appearances aside, the end result will belie the looks (i.e., it'll be yummy).

Since I was thinking about beer and dark ages and Catholics, those poor "benighted" souls, and since all the Homebrews are either Knights of Columbus or related to Knights, I thought that might make a great name for this batch of homebrew: Beknighted Dunkel.

Duped On Dunkel

Ok, ok, look -- it was only $1.50 and I was on a smorgasbord run, so I tried it. I did it, I tried it, and I'm sorry -- you satisfied? Michelob has a new offering on the market Dunkel Weisse, which is a dark wheat beer.

Now, I am a sucker for a Hefe-Weissen which is a lighter, unfiltered wheat beer with yeast at the bottom (excellent for a hot summer day). I recently had some craft brewed Weissen from Sweetwater Tavern where they brew their own beer which was truly yummy (we had to keep going back for more). This beer was a caramel cousin of the hefe-weissen and is a little like drinking a loaf of freshly baked wheat bread.

That's what I was thinking about when I picked up the latest offering from Anheuser-Busch. That's not what I got. Now, at first I had my hopes up -- the beer had that great wheat smell, beautiful brown-amber color, and a good head. The taste was a good solid wheat with a touch of sweetness on the front of the palette; the finish was the disappointment, as it went down watery and tasting a little thin.

Overall, it was an "ok" beer, but failed to thrill. It was similar in lackluster performance like Budweiser's new American Ale. Definitely a step up for these macro-breweries and likely to be radical for the Bud and Mic crowds who arent' accustomed to full-palette beers. It's hard to screw up wheat beer, which is its saving grace. For a more gratifying experience from A-B, try their Belgian style Shocktop Wheat.

To contrast, my follow up experience was with Weihenstephaner's Hefeweissbeir Dark, "The World's Oldest Brewery" since 1040. This beer is a true classic, a paragon of dark wheat excellence. Its malted wheat has a fuller feel in the mouth and the sweetness lingers on the finish. Right away, I could tell this beer was in a much higher class; far removed from the Michelobs of the world. Weihenstephaner is a Dunkelweiss worthy of the name.

Drinking good beer has ruined me -- I just can't go back to pale imitations from the "tastes great, less filling" crowd.