How to Brew Wheat Beer

Wheat beer is less common than a traditional barley and hops brew, but that's not for lack of flavor or because it's difficult to brew. In fact, wheat beer is just as easy to brew as traditional full-barley brews. It's cloudier and a bit more tart, but no less flavorful. With a few modifications to a traditional beer recipe, you can easily make a full-flavored wheat beer using basic brewing equipment.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Brew kit
• Wheat middlings (or extract)
• Sanitizing equipment
• Brewing equipment

1. Clean and sterilize your equipment. Use a mild bleach mixture to help sanitize barrels and buckets, and ensure there is no residue from previous brewing attempts left in your equipment. Any residue will have a strong effect on how your wheat beer tastes.

2. Choose your starting mixture of wheat and barley. While you can brew beer without any barley, a good proportion for reducing the cloudiness of a wheat beer is roughly three to one.

3. Boil the water necessary for your recipe. Small personal batches usually call for roughly 3 to 6 gallons of water. This number will be specified in your recipe, so be sure to read your measurement requirements carefully.

4. Add your malt extracts to the boiling water. Wait for the water to reboil.

5. Add in your mixture of hops once the water has returned to a boil. This is the step in the process that can always be done to your personal taste. Which hops you use will affect the final flavor of the wheat beer, so go ahead and experiment from batch to batch.

6. Allow this mixture to boil rapidly for 1 hour.

7. Remove the boiling mixture from the flame and cool it rapidly in cold water. A stoppered sink would work well for this.

8. Add the yeast to this mixture and seal the container to allow the solution to ferment for 2 weeks.

9. Add in priming sugar so the yeast can carbonate the beer. Let this mixture sit for an additional 2 weeks.

10. Chill and serve!

Tips & Warnings

• Add different ingredients to the mixture to alter the flavor. For a wheat beer, nuts and fruits can be incorporated into the wort to give it a distinct flavor. Just be sure to siphon off these ingredients before you ferment the wort.
• Feel free to alter a wheat beer recipe to make it your own, but always try to include some malted barley in the mixture to help reduce the cloudiness. The barley doesn't actually draw off the haze--it just reduces the amount of wheat in the mixture that would otherwise cause cloudiness.

Resources

• Learn brewing techniques from HowtoBrew.com.

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