816 Redditt Weizen

At last, the impending step towards self-sufficiency: using well water. At Rina's farm, drinking water is brought in by the bottle from the town's municipal taps. They have a fully functioning well, but as the taste goes, the majority prefer not to drink it. My goal was to move closer towards a sustainable brewing process whereby the resources I would draw upon would be both local and cost efficient. Beer being over 90% H20, it seemed the logical step to utilize what was available in spades.

Aplty named after the location of this foray into well brewing, 816 Redditt Weizen is my first attempt at a wheat beer. The image at left is more a demonstration of what crazy colors come out of different strains of hops, but the purple coming from the boiling of the Saaz hops was a new experience to say the least. Note, these hops are green in color before mixing into the boiling wort, so I don't really know if there's a chemical reaction happening to cause this or if they just turn purple when diluted. This was another all-grain batch, utilizing my mash tun which is working like a champ. The only other notable occurance during the brewing of this batch was the extreeeeme amount of activity happening in the primary carboy about 10 hours after pitching the yeast. The yeast was going absolute bonkers inside the primary, quite amazing to watch as there was no external anything stirring the batch, and yet it looked like it could power a turbine just by the amount of self-propelled mixing going on. Just below, is a picture of the blow off hose I had attached, and obviously the fermentation was strong enough to need it.

This batch was bottled last weekend, and yielded slightly less than an average 5 gallon batch: 29 Grolsch bottles and 1 3litre Rossi jug. I purposely made less because I wanted to utilize the "new" 20litre green carboys that I had picked up off of kijiji along side a whole lot of retired fermentation gear for a very reasonable price. The woman I bought the stuff from had made wine for 20 or so years and decided she was moving to Okanagan Valley, British Columbia (thats wine country folks) so she wouldn't be needing her rigs. After bottling, the taste in the gravity test tube was so-so. Had an acquired taste, but if the riddle of fermentation is good beer, I think I'm in for a surprise!