Wednesday 24 February 2010

10. Cardamom Red Wheat



Brew details
Malt: Pale ale malt, Roasted Wheat, Golden Naked Oats, Glucose
Hops: Northern Brewer, Brewer’s Gold, Willamette, Mystery Slovenian ‘Tryal’
Spices: Green and Black Cardamom, Black Pepper, Malabar Cinnamon
O.G. 1065
Yeast: Weihenstephan and Belgian Wit

This should be an interesting one. I’m hoping that interesting won’t be a euphemism for crap. I love the aroma of cardamom and think that it will go well with wheat beer flavours. Most people assume that the flavour of wheat beer is largely due to the wheat. Well in truth it isn’t. It’s the yeast. I am using two wheat beer yeast in competition. In the Belgian corner is Hoegaarden’s (InBev) wheat beer yeast facing the German Weihenstephan or Gloria as I like to call her. The Belgian is spicy with some clove character while the German is strongly banana with some phenol thrown in. Both are exhaustive fermenters so tend to give a dry tart beer.

This wheat beer will be red due to the use of roasted wheat instead of wheat malt. I’ve been dying to use the Roasted wheat since it arrived from Simpsons. It’s got a kind of burnt toast aroma. Just sniffing it makes you hungry. I’m hoping that this will work with the spices to counter the banana notes from Gloria.

My concern about this beer is that there may be too much going on. Potentially we’ll have;

1. Roast
2. Caramel
3. Citrus
4. Cloves
5. Cardamom
6. Cinnamon
7. Banana
8. Cereal

It could start to smell like a dustbin. We shall see!

2 comments:

ZakAvery said...

Interesting. I've just been reading about mash rests and 4-vinyl guaiacol. Furthermore, spectacular results can apparently be achieved if you mash malt and wheat grists separately, then combine them in the boil.

I don't envy your job one bit.

Anonymous said...

How did you find handling the Belgian wit yeast? I use the White Labs version often and without fail it stalls at about 50% attenuation and needs daily rousing. It doesn't matter if I change the pitching rate or amount of oxygen. The results are worth the effort though.

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