Brew Day - Dunkelweizen

I have decided to start a blog where I can document my brewing and add photos & videos explaining homebrew techniques and processes.

Today I brewed a Dunkelweizen, which is a German dark wheat ale. They are known for being filling and flavorful and can have hints of bananas and clove depending on how you ferment it. Dunkels have always been one of my favorite styles of beer. There's just something simple yet complex about them and they are usually always different, surprising & delicious -

The recipe I used is Mike Hiller's Dunkelweizen and can be found here: http://brewlocal.blogspot.com/2010/01/mike-hiller-dunkelweizen-recipe.html I made few changes like reducing the number of hops.

Below are some photos I took while brewing. First I filled a 5 gallon pot with 4 gallons of water and heated it to 166 degrees Fahrenheit -

I poured the water into my 10 gallon Home Depot igloo cooler and then stirred about 12 lbs of various grains into the water, ensuring that there are no dry spots or clumps of grain -

While that sat at around 148 degrees for an hour or so, I measured out my hops. This particular beer requires a 90 minute boil and I don't make my first hop addition until 30 minutes into the boil. The bags and balls are just things I've acquired to keep the hop pellets from making a huge mess in the beer. The hops are still mixed into the beer during boil and I've always had good results using these - 

I also got my Yeast packet ready. For this beer I used Wyeast's 3068 Weihenstephan strain. I've used this one before and got great results. I especially like the activator packs because you can bust the nutrient packet on the inside and let the yeast start to become active for 2-3 hours prior to pouring it into your finished wort. This saves me time because I don't have to create a full yeast starter, though I still do if I have enough time & planning forethought -

I use a 5 gallon ACE cooler as my hot liquor tank and to measure water. It holds hot water at a stable temperature and I can slowly drain water out of it onto my mash tun's grain bed - 

I use a tiered brew system to drain the wort from my mash tun into the brew kettle, which has a propane burner under it. The draining of the water into the mash tun into the kettle takes a good 35 - 45 minutes usually, I don't rush this step to ensure I extract as much from the grains in the mash tun as possible - 

A close up of my ghetto fly sparge method - using aluminum foil with holes poked in it that slowly drips water over the top of my grain bed - 

Once all or most of my wort has been fully collected, I take a sample to ensure I hit my target specific gravity. Basically this ensures that the beer will come out with a correct ABV reading and that everything is on-track prior to boil - 

I use a tool called a Refractometer. This allows me to take a very small sample of cooled wort with an eye dropper and place it on the viewing area, and then look through the eye hole to get a Brix scale reading which I can convert to a gravity reading - 

I saw a reading of about 12.4 Brix, or 1.049 for my original gravity, which is what my brewing software predicted within .001. Close enough!

Once the beer has been boiling and hops are added throughout the 90 minute boil, the grain from the mash tun can be disposed of. Many people like to reuse this to make bread or dog treats, something I'd like to try in the near future - 

The stuff in between this and the final product is a lot of just moving the beer from one place to another. Cooling it from boiling to 70 degrees and siphoning it to the plastic food-safe carboy where it will ferment with the ale yeast I showed earlier -  

That was the brew day. One thing I've noticed is my efficiency (amount of end wort basically) is really terribly low. I may need to use more water in the long run or just investigate ways to improve efficiency overall.

Thanks for reading!

Ryan