Help With Coopers Wheat Kit Recipe

[brownshoes]

I've only done one brew so far and I'm still just getting my head around the mix & match of ingredients. I searched for similar Bavarian style wheat recipes (eg schofferhofer) but couldn't find anything that used dry wheat malt extract without LDME. I picked up the following from LHBS yesterday and wanted to double check it before going ahead with a brew today.

1.7kg Coopers Brewmaster Wheat can
1kg Dry Wheat Malt Extract
500g Dextrose
WB-06 yeast

Will this work well as is or do I need to reduce wheat malt or dextrose?

Thanks

 

[seemax]

It's hard to make a wheat beer true to style with extract, but I've heard the Coopers kit is pretty decent.

Same goes for yeast, the stand out being Wyeast 3068, however I did a WB-06 Hefeweizen recently and it still delivers a wheat beer, just not one with the unique flavour of commercial beers.

I would dump most (if not all) of the dextrose though, go with the can and 1kg extract and reduce the total volume, maybe down to 18L. That should keep the ABV% up and given the kit IBUs are fairly low it shouldn't effect apparent bitterness.

For your 2nd brew, i doubt you will be disappointed. From my experience, ferment it low around 18C, not near 22C.

Good luck

 

[brownshoes]

Thanks for the advice. I did think about Wyeast but decided that it was a bit expensive while I'm getting started

Are there any issues with reducing the total volume to 18L?

 

[seemax]

Wyeast are going for around $15 now, but bare in mind you can reuse the yeast for easily 3-4 brews (as per dry yeast). Plenty of stuff on the forums, but in a nutshell you can either split the original yeast and make sufficient starters, or simply reuse some of the yeast cake/slurry. For ale/wheat yeasts aim for approx 1/2 cup of thick slurry.

As for the 18L, besides getting less beer, the IBUs will be 20% higher from the kit, but that should not pose any problem. The main benefit is getting an all malt beer... dextrose is great for making alcohol and that's it and at the cost of flavour, body, head retention.

Try a kit beer + 1kg dex, what you get is watery thin beer, soft drink style head, with little or no definition, esp with kit yeast.

A kit + decent yeast + malt extract + specialty grains ... or full extract/spec grains... now you're talking !

 

[brownshoes]

I ended up doing a slight variation after seemax's suggestion. I bumped it up by 2L in total volume and added some dextrose to compensate (I kinda went a little crazy with some brew calcs ).

1 Coopers Wheat Kit
1kg DWME
200g dextrose
safbrew wb-06
20L total volume

It had a slightly higher OG than I was expecting (1052). The problem is now that it's been fermenting for over 2 weeks at ~22-24c. The last hydro reading was 1012 3 days ago and it's still bubbling away.

Is it taking so long because there were too many fermentables?