beekeeper put into action, 5th brew

[amberfiend]

here we go, brew number five. ive been eyeballing the beekeeper recipe for a few weeks, i was toying with the idea of making a light crystal, oat mash in the hope of adding some hazeness but im too inexperienced at this point so decided against it for the time being. anyway it started to play on my mind a bit so i decided to acquire the necessary ingredients, but i did make a slight alteration to the recipe

https://www.diybeer.com/au/recipe/beekeeper.html#

in brief, everything is practically the same except instead of the 1kg of LDM i used a 1.5kg can of thomas coopers wheat malt extract

https://www.diybeer.com/au/thomas-coopers-wheat-malt-extract.html

and i also threw in 200 grams of muntons brew enhancer which is just malt and dextrose.

and because of the extra malt and sugars from both the wheat extract and the brew enhancer i also threw in the satchet of coopers yeast that came with the thomas coopers preachers hefe wheat extract on top of the 11gm Lallemand Munich Wheat yeast

the OG before adding yeast was 1046 and tasting a sample from what was in the hydrometer i can definitely say that this is a blue gum honey beer lol, whether or not this remains the dominant character of this brew after fermentation i have no idea ? but i will keep you informed on how things go over the next week or so, should be interesting yeah

heres a few visuals to go with the rant, njoy *the beekeeper is the lower fermenter, darker looking wort etc

 

few shots of the two yeasts being pitched and drowning into the wort

 

Edited September 14, 2020 by amberfiend

[amberfiend]

*oh, and although everything was in the FV and positioned in its place for the duration at 6pm, the tempreture was around 26degrees in the wort so i had to wait until nearly 6 hours later at 11:50 pm to pitch the yeast when the wort temp had finally dropped to just below 22 degrees. took a quick look 5 mins ago (10am the next morning) and the yeast is already fired up in a wierd way, its formed a white foamy mountian in one side of the FV rather then an evenly layed blanket of foam at this point, but i expect it to look completely different by tomorrow after watching how some of the previous yeasts have behaved on earlier brews.

[amberfiend]

when i first checked it yesterday there was the strange lopsided mountain of white foam rising on one side of the fermenter, when i checked it again later in the day at 4pm the foam had taken up all the empty space in the top of the fermenter and was even touching the lid, a few hours later at 6 pm it had started falling back down again already so there seemed to be a spike where the two yeasts kicked into action about 16 hours after pitching it.

when i looked at it this morning the white foam up top seems to have comfortably settled evenly and is taking up the top two thirds of empty space in the fermenter.im wondering if this is typical behaviour for the munich yeast or the yeast that comes stock with the hefe wheat extract ? or maybe a result of combining the two ?

[amberfiend]

* little update

gravity has been at 1008 (OG was 1046) for the last few days so i decided to just bottle it so i could free up the FV, so im expecting the final %ABV to be roughly around the %5.5 mark.

the foam scenario had pretty much died down and there was just a light patchy foam left on top of the wort. the strong dominant blue gum honey that was the most obvious character of the wort upon initial tasting has really falling back into the back ground now and i guess im tasting more of the alcohol and wheat beer base, but im pretty sure the final taste in a few weeks time after bottle ferment occurs and i let a few bottles occupy the fridge for a few days will be a lot different to what it tasted like this afternoon.

anyway as far as finally quantity goes, i ended up with 21 x 740ml pet bottles and also 24 x 330ml bottles, so about 66 stubbies worth at the end of the day yeah lets hope it turns out nice eh