Bottling Notes, American Wheat (Wed 28may2008)

Bottled my american wheat yesterday. This was earlier than I normally bottle as I generally like to give the beer a full 2 weeks in the primary to condition. However, I've got a really busy week and will be out of town for 10 days at the end of the week so I didn't really have another good time to do it.

I checked the gravity and it was 1.013 two days in a row, so hopefully it has reached the approximate terminal gravity. If i come back from vacation to exploded bottles, I'll know otherwise (condition in covered plastic tub just in case :) ).

Anyhow:

I got almost exactly 5 gallons of bottled beer (54 x 12 oz. equivalent). I bottled with 5/8 cup corn sugar for an estimated 2.2-2.3 vol CO2. This was on the low end of the range for this style, but my original gravity was also on the low end so I don't want to thin it out the malt flavor too much by overcarbonating. Also, since I did bottle earlier than usually, I didn't rule out that it may have another point of so to go down which would further carbonate the beer.

Final Gravity ~ 1.013

OG ~ 1.038 (1.040 if you count priming sugar)

% attenuation ~ 65 %

% abv ~ 3.2 % (3.4 % factoring bottling sugar)

Calories per 12 oz. ~ 126

A few notes on this beer:

1. This is the first truly top flocc'ing yeast I've used, the yeast were all floating on top of/within the beer when I bottled. Maybe they would settle after another week in the fermentor, but it didn't look like they were going to sink like all the other yeast I've used.

2. This beer tasted delicious right out of the fermentor. The flavor was very remeniscent of Bell's Oberon Ale. Has that orange/citrus tang to it. Apparently Wyeast 1010 is the yeast they use for that brew, so it makes since. This beer would make it a good candidate for a bootleg straight-outta-the-fermentor cask ale that I have contemplated doing for a party or something. I'll keep that in mind.