The Speise must flow

I wanted to wait a bit before doing this post as the American Bitter brew was a little more involved time wise than most brews.  This is because while the brew itself was very basic, a week later we had to do a technique called "dry hopping".  Dry hopping is actually extremely easy and only means you threw hops into the fermenter after it had been fermenting for a bit.  Specifically, we still used hops during the brew, but a week later we took two of the hops packets, listed below, and put those in a nylon mesh bag to place into the fermenter.  We've never done this before so we did a bit of reading ahead of time to make sure we did it right.  The act of placing it is obviously not difficult, but we wanted to make sure we got the timing down, as well as determining whether we should move to a 2nd fermenter yet.  We have determined that we will be moving it to a 2nd fermenter next weekend.  The ingredients for this brew were:

Grains:

1lb Munich

8oz Crystal 15L

8oz Crystal 40L

Hops:

1oz Cascade (Bittering Hops boiled for 90 minutes)

1oz Liberty (Flavoring Hops boiled the last 15 minutes)

1oz Cascade (Aroma Hops boiled the last 1 minute)

1oz Cascade and 1oz Willamette (Both hops added to fermenter after 7 days.  Transfer after 3-7 days of Dry Hopping)

We have also bottled our Porter, which we have now labeled Night Porter.  The label we made is down below using an image I really liked that someone drew of a zombie doorman.

Now, the thing I have been most excited about, we finally brewed a traditional German Hefeweizen.  The guy at the homebrewing shop was about to sell us a kit which was not traditional at all and used extract even.  Fortunately, Kristi knew to get the grains specifically.  The guy at the shop knew exactly what we needed and helped Kristi put together the grains bag filled with traditional Bavarian Wheat.  Now, a traditional Hefeweizen is apparently 50% wheat and 50% barley, these seemed to be indicated by the 6lb White Wheat and the 4lb 2-Row.  For the hops we used German hops (named such), and we used a large bag for the grains again.  This time we used clips to keep the bag leveled high enough so the bottom of the bag did not touch the bottom of the pot, thereby burning it and causing it to rip open like had happened to us previously.  This worked out well and when we took the grains out it was not too much of a hassle, and we placed the hops in when it returned to a boil.  Here is where things actually differ from your average brew.

When I was researching a traditional German Hefeweizen, I wanted to make sure we used a traditional priming sugar.  What I discovered was something called Speise.  Speise, German for food, is the sweet wort from the brew itself.  What we did was, after taking the grains out and before turning the heat back on and placing the hops in, we drained out the appropriate volume of liquid using a hose attached at the base of the pot.  This container is now being stored in our freezer (once it cooled off enough that it wouldn't burst from the temperature difference).  The reason to use Speise, and one of the reasons I was so interested in using it, is that you are using the brew itself before the sugars were converted into alcohol (not to mention before adding hops) and you are not changing the flavor profile of your beer by using the same sugars that made it in the first place.  To calculate how much Speise you should keep, we found this equation: (12*number of gallons)/((Specific Gravity - 1)*1000).  Now, generally speaking, we always use 5 gallons so our numerator will be 60.  We were not clear which Specific Gravity they wanted, but they seemed to indicate the wort itself, however that would be difficult with how hot it was and we wanted to know how much to take at that given moment so I looked up the average expected Specific Gravity and found it is 1.046.  With these numbers we ended up with 1.3 quarts of Speise drained.