Anecdotally, it’s a terrible idea to brew with an all-wheat mash. But, if you ignore that advice you can brew with all wheat in no time. There are a couple of worries though you need to make sure your mash doesn’t get stuck, and you should worry about diastatic power.
There’s an easy trick to fix the first of these problems, just add rice hulls. But, how many hulls? Going by some other recipes, and erring on the side of caution, we went with 1kg of rice hulls. That’s quite a lot, and it ended up being a massive mash, but definitely no problems lautering so it worked.
The second is a bigger problem, but it looked like the diastatic power of the wheat malt was actually not that bad. The warnings about large quantities of wheat in brewing probably refer to using unmalted wheat, which has a diastatic power of zero. To be safe though, and because we wanted to give it a try, we decided to go with a complicated hybrid decoction-infusion mash (we’ll get to that later). Because we’re paranoid, we also added 25g of Amylase to be absolutely certain the sugars would convert. I mean, this is going to be a doppelbock, right?
Grain Bill
- 27% Spelt Malt: 2kg
- 50% Wheat Malt: 3.75kg
- 15% Crystal Wheat: 1kg
- 3% Acid Malt: 0.225kg
- 5% Chocolate Wheat: 0.38kg Chocolate
- 1kg Rice Hulls
Complicated Mash Schedule
To make your life easier, you should soak rice hulls before using them to deal with them soaking up your water. We just put them in the strike water as it heated up. We were planning to add more water if it looked like they’d absorbed too much, but it didn’t appear to be necessary. Mash continued like so:
- Heated 16l of water to 50.5°C to reach 45°C when adding the grain, kept that temperature for 30 minutes. Added 25g of Amylase now.
- Added 1.8l of boiling water to bring it up to 54°C for 30 minutes.
- Removed 3l of wort and heated to boiling, then added back in. Added 3l of boiling water as well. Temperature was 63°C; waited for 30 minutes.
- Did the same as in step 3 again, aiming for 72°C. Unfortunately, only made it to 68°C, so heated with the hob until it was 72°C and left it for 30 minutes.
Sparging
Once the mash was done, we sparged up 27l. Although, after all the water additions, our mash tun was completely full, so we didn’t have to add too much.
Boil
This isn’t a heavily hopped beer. The malt’s supposed to do the talking. Hop schedule and boil is adapted from a dunkelweizendoppelbock recipe:
- 60 minutes left add 14g Styrian Wolf
- 15 minutes left add 2 tsp Irish Moss
- 10 minutes left add 8g Hallertauer
- 5 minutes left add 23g Hallertauer
- 0 minutes left add 5g of Saaz
Cooled after the boil and measured the OG at 1.070 (19.5°C).
Fermentation
Pitched a vial of WLP530 Abbey Ale once it had cooled to 22°C. Racked after three days as it burst the airlock on the primary fermenter.
Two weeks and 4 days later measured the gravity at 1.016 so final ABV is probably 7.35%. Bottled, adding 97g of sugar for priming as a syrup, racking onto it and them siphoning into bottles.
Opened after 8 days to check priming and it wasn’t very carbonated yet. Decided to try and carbonate it more by placing in a heat bath using an old fermentation bucket and an aquarium heater.
Left in there for a couple of days. Tasting notes pending.
Wheat Lightning - Dunkeldoppelweizendoppelbock by Edinburgh Brewing Cooperative is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
