What’d You Do Last Weekend?
With a little extra pastry cream and a simple crepe batter, try your hand at a gateau de crepes, also known as mille crepes.
Rhubarb Hefeweizen, Part 1
Last week we started our first homebrew of the season - and it's the first brew we've done in a while. We had some beautiful rhubarb in the garden, and considering our affection for sour beers, Todd and I decided to take a chance with adding rhubarb to a basic hefeweizen recipe. We won't know for a few weeks how it will turn out, but it should be a nice refreshing wheat beer for summer, I hope.
Beer making requires a few special pieces of equipment, but more important is the necessity to keep things sterilized and without any contact to things that have been washed with soap. That's one of the big rules. There are book and websites dedicated to the craft - we're not hardcore homebrewers by any stretch of the imagination - so I'll defer to them for the real technical details. However, in the spirit of sharing, I've added the recipe that we used for the beer (and the slight adjustments we made to it for a little flavor), along with pictures of the different ingredients.
We buy our homebrew supplies from Bob's Home Brew on 55th, behind University Village in Seattle. It's a quirky little place, and the person I can only assume is Bob, is an interesting guy. He has printed recipes available for folks like us who don't have any specific recipe in mind, and he pointed me to a hefeweizen because he thought it might not mask the rhubarb flavor as much as some of the other formulas. He took care to tell me how much he disliked the flavor of rhubarb, and he couldn't imagine why anyone would want to use it in beer, but he was helpful in suggesting when in the process we might add the fruit and which yeast would best support the flavor. Good sport.
Heffe-Weisen
O.G. 1.050 ALC 5%
6.6 lb Breiss wheat malt extract
12 oz Malted wheat
8 oz Aromatic malt
6 oz Cara Pils malt
14 AAU Northern Brewer hops - boil 60 minutes (1.75 oz 2008)
1/2 oz Tettnanger hops - last 30 minutes
1/2 oz Tettnanger hops - last 10 minutes
Yeast, 1010 American Wheat (prepped the night before)
5 gal Distilled water
Our additions
1 oz bitter orange peel
1/2 oz whole coriander
7 thin stalks rhubarb (about 1/2 lb), sliced lengthwise to expose as much flesh as possible (but in long pieces to make it easy to pull out)
Make sure all of your equipment is sterilized before starting!
- Add 3 qt water to a 6 - 8 qt stock pot and heat to 165 - 170 degrees. Stir in grains (we put ours in grain bags and lower the grain bags in). Steep for 30 - 45 minutes at a low simmer.
- After 30 - 45 minutes, pull the gain bags out and rinse them with distilled water directly into the stockpot. Squeeze the grain bags dry and discard.
- Add enough water to the stock pot to make about 2 gal total and bring to a boil. When the water boils, remove from the heat and add malt extracts. Mix well while they're being added or they will burn to the bottom of the pot. Bring it back to the boil and stir periodically to ensure the mixture does not scorch. Add 60 minute hops, boil for 30 minutes, add the 30 minute hops, boil for 20 minutes and then add the 10 minute hops. During the last 5 minutes, add the orange peel, the coriander and the rhubarb. Turn off the heat and strain out the solids with a sterilized strainer or slotted spoon.
- If you have time to wait until the mixture is cooled a bit, do - there's nothing like 5 gallons of sticky boiling hot liquid and glass shattered all over the floor when you add too much hot liquid into a cold carboy. Pour about a 1/2 - 1 gallon of distilled water into a carboy, and then carefully add the hot liquid via a sterilized funnel into the carboy. Top the remainder off with more distilled water (it should make around 5 gal beer) and place in a cold water bath to cool.
- When the temperature is below 80 degrees (don't put anything unsterilized into it to check - feel the temperature on the side of the glass!), add the yeast culture. Ferment between 65 - 70 degrees.
