In progress – this will be a recurring theme as we brew our new beers and test out the recipes that we have posted on here. We’ll provide feedback as to how we thought the beers turned out.
Ok, so we have decided our next beer will be the Belgian Wit Bier recipe that we loaded up about a week ago or so. This beer utilizes both normal brewing ingredients as well as some cooking spices and grocery ingredients. We had some trouble getting the Orange Honey (Honey made by bees that are utilizing orange blossoms for the pollen, not necessarily orange flavored honey), so we decided to substitute with normal honey and increase the amount of Orange peel that the recipe calls for to make up some of the orange flavoring that should come through from the beer. The other regular ingredients were pretty easy to come by, as they are normal spices found in most kitchens, being the coriander and the orange peel.
Ingredients:
Now, I have been told that a camping stove with a propane burner can be very useful for getting a full 5 gallon pot boiling very quickly. We have not gone through the cost for one of those yet, and, as such, we are using the normal gas stove with 2-3 Gallons of water in a 5 gallon pot. It tends to take around a full hour to get boiling, but the extra room in the pot does make boil overs easy to account for. We are fans of getting a couple gallons of distilled water to help with measuring as well as cooling the wort down quickly. Use one gallon as the start for the pot (pour it in, then use it like a huge measuring cup for the rest), and use the other gallon as a giant ice cube to cool the wort back down after boiling is done. We stick the second gallon in the freezer about a day before we’re ready to brew so that it has time to freeze, then when the wort is just about done boiling, we pull the frozen gallon out, cut the plastic off and dunk the entire gallon into the wort to cool the boil down to 75 degrees so the yeast can grow.
I put together a fermenting fridge using some of the “suggested items” that I posted on the intial Tips/Instructions post. This fridge has the ability to hold its temperature around 30-80 degrees by turning on and off the electricity to the fridge as needed. Below is a photo of the belgian wit bier fermenting in the fridge.
Wort Fermenting:
Transfering the beer from the first stage of fermentation to the second stage via siphon:
a nice golden brown color for the belgian beer pouring into the secondary fermenting bucket.
I will post a couple Updates to this in the coming weeks as we move from secondary fermenting to bottling, then to tasting and enjoying our new beer.
We’ll be seeing you soon!
Home Brewing Recipes 