After this first attempt at a witbier I set out to tune the recipe to try to fix what went bad last time. But while thinking about tuning down the coriander I considered replacing it entirely by something else entirely to give the beer a bit of a distinctive flavour. In a witbier the coriander is here to provide a bit of an herbal flavour so my eyes went for plants used for herbal teas. Living in Ireland, my preference would have been for Red Clover which I see oftentimes growing a bit everywhere but it turned out to be tricky to source in a dried form to make tea. Instead what I could find is Raspberry leaves so this is what this brew would be about.
Brew day, August 4th 2023
The raspberry leaves is the main difference compared to Witbier #1 but I also changed two other things:
- Use Tettnanger hops as they provide the right cocktail of flavours (spicy, floral, herbal) and they came up as warmly recommended for this style in this book. Witbier are not much about hops and I use very little of them but I expected it to indeed work well
- Remove the rice hulls as last time it seems the mash could work well enough without them
- Mash at higher temperature in the hope that this will increase head retention
Here we go for the grain then:
GrainQuantityPercentage
Pale wheat450g45%
Pilsen MD450g45%
Flaked torrefied Maize50g5%
Flaked torrefied Oats50g5%
That went in with 2.5L of RO water for a 60 minutes mash at 67 degrees Celsius. After a sparge with 4.5L of RO water I moved to a 60 minutes boil with the following additions:
TimingIngredientQuantity60
Tettnang hops3g15
Tettnang hops3g15
Protafloc1 pellet10
Orange peel bitter14g5
Raspberry leaves10g
At the end when everything had cooled down I added 3g of Lallemand wit to this wort reaching a gravity of 10.44
Bottle day, August 20th 2023
After a few days fermenting the final gravity was at 10.02, accounting then for around 4.5 % ABV. I did a batch prime with 30g of priming sugar dissolved in 200ml of water and bottled everything up in 500ml bottles. For the label I tried to use Adobe Firefly to generate a frame illustrating the ingredients:
Tasting
The first bottle got open on the 25th and was very flat. This confirmed it’s best to stick to the 2 weeks rule for bottle carbonation. The following bottles tasted later had for feedback an overall pleasant taste but, for some, too much of a raspberry flavour. This indeed came through as surprisingly quite intense! For the next brew I’ll try to do everything the same except cut the amount of leaves in half (5g instead of 10g).
https://conceptfermentationlab.wordpress.com/2023/11/14/witbier-2/
#1 #Beer #Witbier