Gingerbread Man on 22/4/2007 at 18:56
Hooray! Bottling day!
We've just finished bottling a Hefeweizen (first time we've tried that) and now it sits all happy and gurgly, the last stragglers of the yeast chewing their final sugary meal and making lovely carbonating farts.
Here are a couple of things, and I ask them because I think I recall there being a few other homebrewers around in here...
During primary ferment there was ... how can I put this? A superabundance of foam. Like "Oh God what's that and how do we make it stop?" foam. Not just all up inside the carboy, but very quickly blasting its way through the airlock and creating a fairly gargantuan mound of foam all over the top of the five-gallon jug. And not just once, either... We'd clean it all up, replace the airlock, and three hours or so later we'd have to do it again.
Anyone had any experience with that sort of thing happening? Our blind guess it that it might have had something to do with using the dried malt extract... So far we've only done liquid extract and mini-mash brews, so for all I know this is fairly normal. It was foamy as hell when we were boiling.
Question 2, and I ask this still very chuffed by the brawn of my Three Policemen ale... Has anyone ever heard of a Hefeweizen with an OG of 1.106? Not only that, but the FG was 1.012 which, if my math is correct, works out to an expected TWELVE POINT THREE PERCENT abv. :o
One thing I do find very intriguing about Hefeweizens is that apparently you can emphasise the banana esters or the clove esters by playing around with the primary fermentation temperature. Which sounds wicked. The one we've just bottled was fermented at the upper end of the spectrum but not right up there, you know? I've had very banana-tasting Hefeweizens, and I didn't think it was all that appropriate for a beer, but ours is not particularly heavy on the banana.
Anyway, yeah. In light of what appears to be an extraordinarily high-gravity Hefeweizen with a palpable aura of danger surrounding that projected abv percentage, I am going to christen it "Dwarf Star Hefeweizen" :D
Renault on 22/4/2007 at 19:04
Since you're pretty tight with the server goddess, maybe you should ask Mr. Ledd? I know he has a website on brewing, can't remember the url right now.
Gingerbread Man on 22/4/2007 at 19:07
brewmonkey, yeah
I never seem to get around to posting over there, even though I've been a member for years. I actually did think of giving him a phone call, and I still might.
Ghostly Apparition on 22/4/2007 at 20:01
I have a client that does some homebrewing and they said they put the 5 gallon jugs in an unused shower because of the foam problem. Not sure what the reason is but apparently it does happen. The foam was a huge mess as you described.
also apparently doesn't affect the outcome as they said it turned out great. This happens almost everytime too, they said.
Fafhrd on 22/4/2007 at 20:32
Quote Posted by Gingerbread Man
Has anyone
ever heard of a Hefeweizen with an OG of 1.106? Not only that, but the FG was 1.012 which, if my math is correct, works out to an expected TWELVE POINT THREE PERCENT abv. :o
You must save many of these and bring them to the SF meet. I will accept no excuses.
Gingerbread Man on 22/4/2007 at 20:42
They aren't for us. :(
We did manage to keep 9 bottles back for our own enjoyment, though. But there's no way I'll be able to save any of them. :D
Duncan on 22/4/2007 at 21:00
Quote Posted by Gingerbread Man
Has anyone
ever heard of a Hefeweizen with an OG of 1.106? Not only that, but the FG was 1.012 which, if my math is correct, works out to an expected TWELVE POINT THREE PERCENT abv. :o
Not bad. Did you OD on sugar to boost that so high? Or is that typical of what you were brewing? Just curious as that's what i done with my last experimental batch. Dumped twice the amount of sugar in that sucker and sat back to watch the show. Mine (plain Coopers lager) came out at 7.6%. Not a bad drop. Here's a question though... if i up the sugar dosage should i also be using extra yeast? I only used the same amount of yeast that i'd put in with half the sugar i used. I'm not good at this stuff but i figured the yeast would do its stuff all the same.
I've never had the sort of foam problem you've mentioned though. I've had it come close, but never enough to actually shoot through the airlock.
Gingerbread Man on 22/4/2007 at 21:16
I'm still betting that the foam had to do with the use of DME instead of liquid extract or grains. This is the first beer that's ever done anything like this. We never even get much foam on the top of the wort, never mind having approximately five cubic feet of the stuff creeping its way into the Real World.
But no, there was no added sugars or anything. I'm getting pretty good at making very high-gravity beers without.
And also that's a thing: If the wort had an awesomely high gravity (which it did... 1.106 what?), I doubt very much whether a single vial of White Labs Hefeweizen yeast would have been able to chew it down from 1.106 to 1.012 in only two weeks.
But then, perhaps the foam explosions were a by-product of a particularly gluttonous yeast orgy.
Rug Burn Junky on 22/4/2007 at 23:40
Quote Posted by Gingerbread Man
a particularly gluttonous yeast orgy.
That reminds me of a girl I once knew.
*shudder*
daprdan on 23/4/2007 at 00:09
All my experience has been with a fruit mash,and that is a foamy mess as well.I do the fermenting in a plastic garbage can so it doesn't grow out of the container.Not appropriate for beer though,I would think.I use a champagne yeast,which gives me about 18% abv.There are what is called Turbo yeasts which will yield up to 25% abv but impart a chemical taste to the end product.
