This brew day I decided to make a Belgian Wit which is one of my favorite summertime beers. Wit beers are traditionally very light almost a white color which is why they are often called "White beer". The orange peel and coriander seed adds a citrus note to the beer. It also has a high % of flaked wheat and oats which create a creamy texture. To me nothing is better on a hot Phoenix day! Commercial examples would include Hoegaarden or Shock Top.
This is the recipe sheet I used. I use
BeerSmith for entering all my recipes and would recommend some kind of software if you are doing all-grain. Extract and partial mash brewers can get by without this. This recipe come from Brewing Classic Styles.
Here is just after I added the strike water to the grains
Collecting the first runnings. I will then sparge the grains and repeat.
Just another view of collecting the wort.
Here I have collected all the wort and brought it to a boil and am just adding the hops. This recipe called for a 90 minute boil to reduce the DMS in the beer but the hops only had to boil for 60 min so the wort has been boiling for 30 minutes already. The orange peel and coriander is added with only 5 minutes left in the boil.
Here I am zesting the oranges for the boil. I tried to get oranges from 3 different sources to add to the complexity of the flavor.
This is my cooling rig. Not pretty but it works. It is a copper immersion chiller that I run tap water through. Here in Phoenix though the tap water will only get it down to about 110 so I bought a pump to circulate ice water through to finish chilling it to the desired 80 degrees.
One month later a new Belgian Wit is finished. Overall I really like this batch and am very happy with the results. Wits are a difficult beer to keep consistent batch to batch as you are dealing with the freshness of the coriander and the oranges that can both make a big difference in the final taste. This is only my second Wit and this one came out much better than the first.
Prost!
