New Round of Homebrew

I once again took advantage of my mostly-day-off (had to greet the organ tuners and make sure that Sunday's bulletin got run first thing in the morning) by starting another round of homebrew. The recipe in question this go-round is a Dunkel Weizen; that is, a dark hefeweizen. I will say that for about 2 or 3 years running, Weihenstephaner Hefeweiss Dunkel has been among my very top favorites at the WBF -- I can't presume that what I've got in the fermenter will even come close to that goodness, but it's a style I love and am anxious to see what happens.

I do find it amusing that this beer is oft hight, "Dunkel Weiss," which means, of course, "Dark White." I also find it interesting that the two names frequently interchanged for this beer style, weizen and weisse (wheat and white), are only different from each other by a couple of letters. Handy and confusing! And, given my current naming scheme (composers and all that) I simply couldn't resist the urge to pun and style this go-round (and all my subsequent hefewiezen, I'm sure) Silvius Leopold Weiss, in honor of that great baroque composer and friend of Bach's that no one's ever heard of. He has his own webpage, and even shows up on YouTube a few times, including here, here, and here. His music is truly wonderful. Anyway, I'm having way too much fun with this thing. I've also made up a sample label for this one, and put the whole thing in a Fraktur font. I'm pretty pleased with it.


Here's what I did:

6 lbs Northwestern wheat extract (liquid)
1 lb Northwestern dark malt extract (dry)
1 lb crushed crystal malt grain
0.5 lb crushed chocolate wheat grain
1 oz Liberty pellet hops (bittering)
1 oz Tettnang pellet hops (finishing)
White Labs liquid German Ale/Koelsch yeast

Original Gravity chimed in at 1049.9 (I *think* -- I'm still getting used to this whole hydrometer thing), which sounds about right to me.

I also used (for the first time) NC mountain bottled spring water instead of tap. I have a particular aversion to and disgust of buying bottled water, but did this for a couple of reasons:
1) My parents now live on a farm in Ashe County, NC, with its own wonderful mountain spring. I'm anxious to make use of their spring water for future brews, and needed some gallon jugs with which to transport the water. Hence, the purchase.
2) I haven't had any disastrous results with the Tryon town water thus far, but it's still not my favorite. I really don't want beer with flouride and chlorine in it, as yummy as that sounds. So, this is also something of an experiment to see if there is any discernible difference in taste.
And, at the end of the day, I'm not using Dasani.

Finally, for good measure, one more Weiss: