Homebrew Recipe: Newly Wedded Wheat

When a wonderful couple asks you to brew beer for their wedding – you say yes! This recipe was crafted based on their input that “Blue Moon” and “Wheat Beers” were their favorite. Making a clone of Blue Moon was not going to happen because I cared about these people too much. I insisted I would make a crowd pleaser that would be even better than Blue Moon. With that goal in mind I built an American Wheat beer that had some hints of orange. Sounds similar to blue moon but it had much more malted wheat flavor and higher ABV than Blue Moon packs.

Recipe

Grain Bill

6lbs White Wheat Malt

5 lbs 2 Row Pale Malt

1 lb Crystal 60

1 lb Vienna

Hop/ Fruit Schedule

(60) 1 oz Centenniel

(20) 1 oz Cascade

(5) ½ oz rehydrated sweet orange peel

(1) ½ oz Willamette

Yeast - Safeale US-05

Boil Volume – 6.5 Gallons

Fermentor Volume – 5.25 Gallons

OG – 1.052

FG – 1.008

ABV – 5.8%

Procedure: Mashed grains at 152 for 1 hour and then added 6 gallons of sparge water. Obtained fairly low efficiency due to batch sparging and leaving volume behind. Boil was standard but be sure to rehydrate the orange peel for about 30 minutes before adding it in.

Fermentation/ Packaging – Primary fermentation only for 3 weeks – 1 batch was kegged and slowly carbed while the other was force carbed.

Tasting Notes – To get the full story on this beer – you’ll have to wait for the wedding adventure post.

Improvement/Tweak Ideas – One batch had orange peel added at 10 mins and another batch was at 5 mins. The orange was much more pronounced with the 10 minute addition but not necessarily in a good way. If brewing again would consider increasing wheat malt slightly to see affect on flavor and ABV. Would also be interesting to see how bitter orange peel affects flavor in comparison to the sweet orange peel that was used.