Recent content by SumnerH

Flaked or raw wheat is important to a traditional wit. As noted above, flaked oats are somewhat common too. More importantly, you don't want to use any sweet orange peel in a true wit; using it will give you more of a crossover wit/American pale wheat beer (a la Blue Moon). If you're aiming...

We found an interview with Brad Rogers (Matilda Bay's master brewer), he said it's just 50/50 wheat and barley. Cane sugar would dry out a recipe this small quite a bit. Though I can't personally comment on whether that's appropriate or not for Redback in particular, it seems out of place for...

We cracked the first one today. It's probably 80% carbed, so shy of the final product, but it tastes good and SWMBO was impressed. She said it tasted close to the real thing, but it's been a while since she's had one so she couldn't pin down the differences. I'm hoping she'll have some more...

We have "Weetabix" which are basically the same thing (same people invented them but for some reason there's an extra "a" in there), but they're not all that common. Organic food stores often have raw wheat (I know the local Whole Foods does here). If you start adding a bunch of zest or other...

A wit needs bitter orange peel. Believe it or not, the citrus taste in a wit comes from the coriander, while the orange peel is used more for bittering--don't think about using another citrus fruit (be it sweet orange or grapefruit/lemon/etc) unless you're willing to move away from a wit's...

I just found it amusing that he converted everything else to kg/grams but had one lone ingredient measured in oz. :) But, yeah, the exactly converted equivalents for 3 lbs of various grains, 1.25 oz of hops, etc are a red flag that we're working in Stone Age measurements over here (I'm an...

What's with the oz measure here? I'd add some bitter orange peel (do not use sweet orange peel!) if possible, and I might slightly up the ratio of wheat but it looks pretty good.

Doesn't mean much until it's carbed and in our bellies, but early returns are promising. We racked it Tuesday. Comment from SWMBO: "That smells pretty close". By today, the gelatin had cleared it up pretty nicely.

Excellent idea. Yes, and especially for a bittering hop @60 minutes I'm guessing the substitution won't make a huge difference. But still, at least for Australia day next year it'd be nice to have a bit of authenticity!

POR is a terrible, awful hop. It will ruin anything you put it in. Please mail it to me for proper disposal. This message has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I'm trying to clone Redback (which uses POR for bittering), and POR isn't available over here in the USA (hence I'm stuck...

I got impatient and took a grav reading. 1.014 after 5 days. In all likelihood I'll rack to secondary (on gelatin) Monday or Tuesday, then bottle in another week--usually I give 3 weeks or so in primary and 2+ in secondary, but for a weizen I'll cut back significantly.

Greetings from the USA from someone raised in maple syrup producing territory! I think there's 3 different maple things in the conversation now. 1. Fake maple syrup is the liquid stuff that's 98% corn syrup. In the USA it's sold under brand names like Mrs Butterworth, Aunt Jemima, and Log...

If you're paranoid, either: a. add it to the boil (near the end); or b. boil it in a small amount of water (mainly to sterilize, but also to ensure that it dissolves) and let it cool a bit before adding to the fermenting wort. The latter is pretty common among people who do incremental feeding...

So, we brewed this yesterday. I made a couple of tweaks to maintain the same basic parameters--the Breiss extract I got was (surprisingly) 60/40 wheat/malt so adjuted the proportions there, and I did a late-addition of 2/3 of the DME so I brought down the bittering hops slightly to compensate...

I'm getting quite excited to try this, sadly I won't be brewing until 10 days from now. I come from the state of Maine in the United States. It's as far north as you can go on the east coast of the USA, north of Boston and parts of it are north of parts of Canada. It's where most Stephen King...