Homebrewing: My Summer Witbier

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This weekend I decided to brew a beer for the summer! :)

I chose to make a witbier with the spices coriander and orange zest!

I'm aiming for a refreshing and easy drinking beer. It should be a perfect beer style for the summer!

The brew method that I used was Brew in a Bag (BIAB).

Here is the recipe that I made!

I forgot to take some pictures in the beginning of the brew, sorry for that.

The things I did was measuring up the grains and the mashing.

When you are mixing up the grains in heated water, make sure there are no clumps.

Let it sit for 1 hour - 1 h 30 min. I always put my sleeping bag around the pan to keep a steady temperature.

After this, it's time for sparging: hot water is run through the grain bed.

The purpose of sparging is to rinse all the sugars out of the grains.

This time I skipped the sparging to save some time (picture taken from another brew day).

Almost boiling!

The foam is caused by proteins in the wort that coagulate due to the rolling action of the boil.

Removing the proteins from the wort to get clearer beer.

Now it's boiling. Adding the first dose of hops (East Kent Goldings) @ 60 min.

I also added some hops (East Kent Goldings) @ 15 min!

Using oranges for this brew!

Orange zest!

Crushed coriander and orange zest were added @ 5 min!

After 60 min boil, you need to chill the wort to yeast pitching temperatures. This is my method!

Everything that touches the wort after the boil needs to be clean and sanitized!

It's very important, otherwise your beer may get infected or you can get a bad taste in your beer.

Filtering strains out the hop gunk, and helps with the aeration by turning the wort into droplets as it falls into the fermenter.

Feeding the animals with the used malt! :)

Measuring the Original Gravity (OG).

The density tells the content of sugar in the wort (how strong the beer will be).

I added boiled water into the wort to get the right OG and amount of wort.

In the end I aerated the wort and made sure that the temperature was right for pitching the yeast.

Within two days it started fermenting.

The lag time was longer than normally but I used a pretty old yeast, so it was expected!

Now just make sure that you have the right room temp all the time so that the yeast stays happy.

I will leave it for at least 2 weeks in the fermentation tank before bottling.

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I hope you enjoyed my post! Thanks for stopping by!

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