7/4/23-5# Wheat Malt & 5# Maris Otter, 3# Raw Wild Honey from Costco. 2# of Home-Grown Muscat Grapes. Aged Mandarina Bavaria 1oz. Will add house sour culture and some bottle dregs for good measure.
Mash: 2ml Phosphoric 75%, 2g CaSO4, 4.5g CaCl, 1.5g MgSo4
Sparge: 4ml Phosphoric 75%, 2g CaSO4, 4.5g CaCl, 1.5g MgSo4
Kettle: 3ml Phosphoric 75%
10/4/2020-This was about 5.25G trying to go into a 5G keg. Woops. Next time-straight mash/batch sparge. It had an oak spiral for about 5 months, next time, the whole fermentation with oak. 2#wheatmalt, 3#marisotter, 12oz flaked wheat, 4oz flaked oats, 12oz honey.
NOTE: F* the mash schedule. Water temps didn't work, ended up with way too much water to boil off. Hit my efficiency, though, I just had to spend an extra long time trying to get enough boil-off to fit the fermenter. Next time, Pre-mash the raw grains (if not flaked) and just do the regular mash schedule.
Also, added 1/2 Gallon of my House Sour Culture, so total into the fermenter is 5.5 Gallons.
Ingredients purchased for batch #2. I am changing the grain bill, adding more honey, a different hop, a different primary yeast, and trying a turbid mash-style with various rests to follow the method for making lambic. Not that it doesn't already taste like lambic, but I am interested in what will happen when I up the wheat and change the mash schedule.
Forgot the champagne yeast at bottling. I also underestimated how much space was in the top of the carboy for bottling and spilled some of the priming sugar. While I was bottling, before I capped all of the bottles, they were burping. I hope this is from active yeast and not just CO2 coming out of solution. Bottled 4 3/4 Gallons, still have 1/2 gallon set aside to start the next batch, solera-style.
This was uninteresting, flat, and dull until 6/2/2019 (approximately 5 1/2 months aging in carboy on lees), at which point the acidity had brightened up the beer and the Muscat flavor started to show through the lifeless tastes. FG worked out to be 1.000.
I tried making the AHA IAMSKB Weisse and it didn't work, so I modified the batch using my wild cultures taken from the Muscat grapes I grow in Torrance. I also added 12oz of Mead that didn't ferment as extra food for the sour culture. Now it is a real sour, amazing in flavor, and so as I pull from it to bottle, I plan to use a Solera-style method to replace the pulled beer with fresh wort and fresh brewer's yeast.