BeerBorg

1. why do I always perceive wheat beers as having a 'furry' or thick mouth feel? no matter how little wheat is used in the beer, if it is in there I almost always can tell by the mouth feel. not that I mind, but is it just me?


2. conditioning: I know flavors meld and mellow ... and come together with time in beers. what I don't know is the science behind it. what exactly is going on that makes a beer so radically different in taste over time? I understand the yeast cleaning up some fusels alcohols.. eating undesirable byproducts etc... but what happens to flavors like orange peel or hops or malt chemically during the process that makes the beer so much better after time?

I have learned to love wheat beer. Its a style of beer in a class of its own for a few reasons I think. It's best when enjoyed young, I mean keg, carb and drink right away young. The mouthfeel has to do with proteins wheat contributes to the beer, that also explains the hazy appearance in the glass. A great brewer learns how to play off of those qualities by adding just enough spice and citrus, I'm talking Witbier now, and carbonation to bring all the elements together into a really refreshing drink.

1. The current favorite at my house is best enjoyed fresh. It disappears pretty quickly after force carbonating the keg for a week. It only has about 6% wheat malt in the recipe, but it nicely complements the regular & rye malts also in that recipe.
2. I don't know the exact science, but all my hoppy ales are better enjoyed as soon as possible. The aromatics from dry hopping seem to fade away with time.

Just like hop aromas/flavors, the esters and phenols produced by the yeast also tend to fade somewhat over time. If you didn't want them, but got some due to underpitched yeast/stress/temperature/whatever then this is a good thing, it's what "cleans up" an "off" beer over time. But in a straight up wheat beer where you want a *lot* of them, because they are the real flavor profile instead of something like hops or a roasty malt or the like, then that mellowing isn't what you want and this is why those styles are better younger and fresher like a hoppy IPA.

I have to admit I added two pounds of torrified wheat to my English IPA recipe this past weekend. Although it only added a little over 8.3% to the grain bill, the extra two pounds brought the total grain bill weight to twenty four pounds. I'd read that wheat was often used in English IPAs so I decided to try it for myself.

For the ten gallon batch I added ten ounces of pellet hops total for bittering, flavor and aroma additions. I kept three ounces of Cascade pellet hops to add as finishing hops but I'm wondering it that would be overkill or not.

I'm swapping out chocolate wheat for Chocolate malt in a stout recipe I'm tweaking. Going for more mouth-feel and that unquantifiable element that wheat might bring.