Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Honey Weizen



Ten Days ago I brewed a honey weizen that called for the use of one pound of honey in the mix. Honey is a complex elemnt in brewing. Some say they can make it stand out in a beer, some say it just ferments out to more alcohol with no evidence of its existence. In this moderate debate between home brewers, some suggest using honey malt, others say use honey at this or that point and some say both. the great thing is, you get to decide. So in this honey weizen, I decided to take the road less traveled, which is both. I purchased two three gallon carboys this past fall for this exact situation. I want to take a batch and slit it up and experiment.

Ive only done this a couple times before. I had a sour ale that was basically liquid jolly ranchers. I tried splitting the batch into growlers and added all sorts of fruits. Nothing changed much except the color. Adding tart (for the most part) on sour is hard to do. The second experiment was with a pale ale. I had some home grown hops that i needed and wanted to use before they went bad, so I added 2.5 ounces to one of the three gallons and let her sit for about a week. It came out pretty well.

So with this batch i wanted to play with the honey. the recipe has both natural and honey malt. Tonight I took that batch and added another cup of honey to one carboy and split them up. I plan to let it sit another week or so and then prime it out in bottles. The finished product should be ready about three weeks from now. Im very interested to see the outcome, both in mouth feel and honey appearance.



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