Wheat Bottling Day

A couple of weeks ago I brewed a Cooper's Brewmaster Selection Wheat with three lbs of Wheat DME and a half lb of carpils steeped. Today I finally bottled it. I had a high FG at about 1.020. The beer tasted good, not sweet and no off flavors that I could tell. I looked up the priming amount for a wheat beer on a couple of sites and finally settled on about 5 oz of dextrose for my 5.5 gallon batch. But after bottling I realized I actually got a only about 4.8 gallons in the bottles. It may be a little over carbed but hopefully I get no bottle bombs.
I used 35 glass 12 oz bottles and 6 1 liter pet bottles. I usually dont use the pet bottles but after using them for my american brown ale I realized I liked them. Less bottles to fill and they hold just enough to fill my 20 oz pint glass twice. If I dont drink both glasses in one night then the pet bottle will hold the carb just fine for about 24 hrs until I finish the bottle. I havent tested the carb beyond that amount of time, however.

Some time has passed this I wrote the first portion of this post. I actually did try keeping beer in an open pet bottle for about 3 days and the carb was fine. The head was significantly less but it was still there.
I also have tried a couple of the wheat beer with less than a week in the bottle. It is really good. The only issue I have is I believe with the Coopers yeast. It leaves a kind of vanilla aftertaste. I also experienced this with the Coopers IPA kit I did a while ago. Of course it could be the extract but I would be led to believe that since its two totally different styles of beer and I used the fromunda Coopers yeast on both batches that it is the yeast.

But the wheat beer is nice and easy to drink. I dont know the exact ABV since I only did a FG hydrometer reading. But with qbrew I estimated it to be around 5% abv. I have a lot of outside projects to do around the house and the wheat beer will be a perfect thirst quencher.

Not ready to bottle.

Mr. Beer Double American Brown Ale

I was thinking about bottling my 317 wheat beer today. Which is just a can of Cooper's Brewmaster Selection Wheat extract with three lbs of wheat DME. But I took the gravity and it was above 1020 so I'm leaving it for about another week in the fermenter. I was really hoping to get this done today but I don't want to rush it and have bottle bombs or under fermented beer.
The other day I decided to try a bottle of the Mr. Beer Double American Brown ale that I brewed a few weeks ago. It spent three weeks in the bottle and was at 12 days in the bottle when I tasted it. I put it in the freezer for about half an hour and then tried it. It was surprisingly good. The pour was perfect with about 2-3 fingers of head, the color is a little dark for a brown ale. The flavor/aroma is really good nice and hoppy up front and carmelly in the back. I didn't do gravity readings on this but according to Mr. beer its about 6.5% ABV. I will try to let these condition for a few more weeks as I can only imagine how good this will taste with a few more weeks in the bottle. But I see myself grabbing one and putting it in the fridge to drink tonight. I bottled this in the Mr. Beer 1 liter bottles, so I had 8 and now only 7 one liter bottles.

National Homebrew Day, Brew day

Saturday was National Homebrew day so I decided to brew up a quick batch. That combined with the pipeline being low led me to brew an all extract batch, which is something I haven't done in a while. I got a Cooper's Brewmaster selection Wheat Beer. I added 3 lbs of DME and steeped half a lb of carapils for body and head.

I brought 1.5 gallons or so of water up to about 160 and added the carapils for about 20 minutes. Then I brought the water close to 200 and removed from the heat and added the DME. Then I brought that to a boil for about 10 minutes. I removed it from the heat and mixed in the Cooper's wheat extract. I added the wort to the fermenting bucket that had about half a gallon of cold water and then topped of to about 5.5 gallons. My temp was high so I put the bucket in an ice batch and cooled down to about 79 degrees before pitching the yeast. The OG was 1.052, and the wort tasted really good.

.5 lb Carapils (steeped)
3.75 lb Cooper's Brewmaster Selection Wheat
3 lb Briess Wheat DME
Coopers yeast