Quick backfill then, for the archives…

Brewday was 3rd May – middle of the bank holiday – and was one of the insufficiently frequent group brewing sessions with @cinykk and @plasticscouser1.
They’d been Blackjack-birthdaying the day before, so it was a late start even by my standards (even the what-to-brew talk started after noon).

We consulted with our assembled “other half”s to avoid prolonged debate, which quickly ruled out Belgians, saisons, wits.  Light drinking summer beer was the suggestion – thirst-quenching and knockbackable.
As I had a 25kg sack of wheat, we figured a low-end abv “white IPA” might fit the bill – that’s hoppy, but mostly wheat malt not barley.  And since we don’t do sensible, and have a fine Black IPA tradition for these sessions, we decided to do a Black White IPA.
I had some crystal wheat around which I’d got for a potential all-wheat beer, so IPA seemed a good place to use it.

Grain bill:
Wheat malt:  5kg
Crystal wheat:  500g
Carafa 3:  120g
100g each of Chocolate, Roast Barley, Black Patent.

That’s a lot of dark roasty things – but the wheat should smooth it out, and it is necessary for the colour to be black not red. We talked round that for a while, but we all subscribe to the view that any black beer should taste at least a bit of roast grains. Otherwise we’d just use food colouring.

LATE EDIT:  the black patent wasn’t in the mash, it was cold steeped at the same time as we mashed.  We lobbed it into the sparge, I think.  Trying to avoid them burnt notes, y’see

While it mashed – I think it was 65C, no water treatment, 15L – we talked hops. Lots of juicy fruits seemed called for so we sorted through the hop box… and came up with Citra, NZ Pacifica, Amarillo, Ahtanum.  The Pacifica is in there for extra interest on the hop profile, being a bit more noble against these exciting fruity tropical chaps.

I think we mashed for about 90 minutes – I didn’t take notes. We were having a drink or 2 as we went so it was slightly freeform…
Ran off 10 litres, with some tap leakage issues (the tube from mash tun tap to wort bucket attaches poorly to the current tap).

Sparged 1 batch, I think, for 18 litres, ish, roundabout 68C if I recall.  While that was standing for a few minutes I went to add the First Wort Hop, Citra, to the wort which was sitting at 78C.  Added a confident 30g and then @cinykk noted that the recipe we’d knocked together said 15g.  Oops.

@plasticscouser1 suggested fishing some back out, an absurd suggestion I immediately pooh-poohed, going back to tweak the recipe to accommodate the overdose.  Which was a pain, so I smoothly decided the best plan was to fish half the hops back out (once we’d FWHd some flavours out, before we upped the temp).  Inspired idea I thought, where does my genius come from?

Hops additions then:
18g Citra, 90 mins, FWH, 14.8% AA
20g NZP, 15 mins, 6.2% AA  – pellet
20g Amarillo, 10 mins, 10.9% AA
20g Ahtanum, 5 mins, 5.7% AA – pellet
And flameout – 30, 10, 20, 10 g respectively.

This means 2/3 of the IBU came from the Citra FWH.  IBU was 46.

We did a bit of a hopstand in the mid-70s, probably 30-45 mins.  Chilled to 24 before I got bored, drained into FV, pitched yeast (US05).  We got 22L out, at 1.053, so a bit lower than hoped for; but the 05 should take it down so we get 5.5-6.0% ABV.

Wort tasted good – hoppy fruit bitterness,  sweet and fullbodied, not too harsh from the roast malts.  We didn’t use Irish moss – not in a wheat beer!  (Well, we might have done but we forgot to decide one way or the other before it got too late)

What observations can we take away?
Wheat didn’t stick for us, though it’s a fine grain – possibly because we used a couple of handfuls of husks – and it smells completely different from a barley mash.
When we’re all brewing and drinking together, we’re noticeably poorer at bothering to take measurements and notes.
Ahtanum hops smell very very nice.
You can fit 20kg of wheat malt into one 30L FV.
10%+ beer is not ideal brewday refreshment.

RIght, archive complete.
Must add pictures to the last couple of posts, no point taking then otherwise…
Cheers all!