BIAB Series – Red Vs. White Wheat

As discussed in this video post about understanding the difference between red and white wheat and our plans for brewing in a bag (BIAB), I started to make a plan to brew small quantities of beer to compare and contrast red wheat malt and white wheat malt.

There are a few different experiments that we would like to do between now and the end of the summer so this post is the start of the BIAB series where we use this method to brew a good number of beers over the next few months.

Using BeerTools, I was able to scale the amounts of grain to make 1 gallon recipes. Since I have a small pot, I can brew up that amount of volume pretty easily and hopefully fairly quickly following the BIAB method.

So, these recipes are very simple, following the single malt and single hop (SMaSH) convention which should help these Brew Dudes to learn about both wheat malt types.

Here are the details:

Mash volume/boil volume: 2 gallons
Batch size: 1 gallon

Ingredients:

2 pounds of wheat malt
.25 oz of Willamette hops
Yeast: White Labs WLP001 California Ale

Instructions:

Pick one of the wheat malts.

Mash it in a muslin bag in a pot big enough to hold 2 gallons of wort for 1 hour at 149 degrees F.
Remove bag and drain well. Add hops and boil for 60 minutes. Cool wort to 72 degress F and transfer it to a gallon bottles. Ferment at this temperature for 2 weeks. Transfer to a bottling bucket and prime using a calculator so you know how much sugar you need for a gallon of beer.

Choose the other wheat malt and follow the above instructions.

Predictions:

BeerTools gave me different results for white wheat malt vs. red wheat malt. Here’s the average between the two recipes.

Original Gravity: 1.054
Terminal Gravity: 1.012
Color: 5 °SRM 3.00 – 6.00 °SRM 87 %
Bitterness: 25 IBUs
Alcohol % of volume: 5.5%

One interesting thing from the tool calculating these recipes was that the red wheat malt would make a beer with a darker color than the white wheat malt beer. We’re talking about the difference of a few degrees SRM but it will be something I will report on when the experiment is over.

Feel free to follow along. I will be ordering the ingredients this week.