In my quest to try brewing different beer styles I landed on a Dunkelweizen as my next experiment. Unfortunately this is really a part 2 of my previous post (Homebrewing a Northern Brewer Oatmeal Stout) and as such it suffers from the same problem…
Recipe Source: Ontario Beer Kegs
Beer Specifications
| Beer Name: | OBK Dunkelweizen |
| Beer Style: | Dunkelweizen |
| Recipe Type: | All Grain |
| Pre-Boil Volume: | 6.25 gallons / 23.66 litres |
| Batch Size: | 5.25 gallons / 19.87 litres |
| Estimated SRM: | 22° |
| Estimated IBU: | 12 |
| Estimated OG: | 1.053 |
| Estimated FG: | 1.013 |
| Estimated ABV: | 5% |
Grain Bill/Fermentables
| LBS | Fermentables |
|---|---|
| 5 | Wheat Malt |
| 4 | Munich Malt II |
| 1 | Pale Chocolate Malt |
Hops
| Oz | Time | Hops |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 60 min | Saaz |
Yeast
| # | Yeast |
|---|---|
| 1 | Safbrew WB-06 |
Fermentation Schedule
| 21 days | Primary |
| 14 days | Bottle Conditioning |
Directions
| Mash Temperature: | 150°F / 65.6°C |
| Mash Time: | 60 min |
| Boil Duration: | 60 min |
Dunkel is a style of beer that I’ll admit I’m not overly familiar with. I’ve sampled a few different ones and other than the colour of the beer the only thing that really stood out to me was the unique and somewhat odd grain/hop flavours.
Because I really had no idea what I was doing I simply grabbed a recipe off of Ontario Beer Keg’s website and went to work. This recipe is pretty basic with only a single hop charge for bittering and as a result my brew day flew by without issue.
Now because I was brewing this outside in the middle of winter I wasn’t able to make use of my immersion chiller and instead opted to try out a no-chill cube I bought off of Amazon. After the boil was complete the hot wort went right into the no-chill cube and sat there for about a day or so before I transferred it to my fermenter. My Original Gravity (OG) at the time of transfer was 1.046. Once in my fermenter I pitched my yeast and let is sit for three weeks to do it’s thing.
After fermentation I measured the Final Gravity (FG) of 1.006 for an estimated ABV of 5.25% which, while being a lower FG than the recipe was looking for, was pretty close to target. I primed at 2.4 volumes of CO2 and let the beer bottle condition for two weeks.
If you read my previous post then you probably know where this is going. For some reason this beer has a chemical like, almost sharp, smell to it that reminds me of the industrial plastic smell of the no-chill cube. Because of that I’m not sure if I should even be drinking this thing let alone re-using that cube in the future…
Tasting Notes
| Smell | Has a very rich dark chocolate smell that is capped off by a sharp chemical smell that I just can’t escape. As before I blame the no-chill cube… |
| Appearance | Nice and dark beer with a head that is a light brown colour. This matches the style from what I’ve seen so I’m at least happy with that. |
| Taste | They say a lot of what you taste is actually smell and because of that I’m having a tough time getting over the chemical smell I mentioned above. That said what I can taste is a very rich chocolatey taste with a really nice mouth feel. |
| Yield | This brew cost $18.34 in ingredients to make and yielded 43x355ml bottles ($0.43/bottle) |
So even though the smell has kind of ruined it for me I still don’t think I’ll bother trying to re-brew this one. Don’t get me wrong, had the smell not been there I think this would have definitely been a drinkable beer. It’s just not a beer that I think I personally would enjoy drinking a lot of.
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