Wheaty mystery
The weiss recipe couldn’t be much more basic. One part wheat malt, one part pilsner: four and a half pounds each. The mash was run of the mill with no extra steps to deal with the wheat protein. The boil was ninety minutes to account for the pils. Hops were 0.70 ounces of Hallertauer at sixty minutes. Throw in WLP300 Hefeweizen for fermentation and that’s that. 1.056 OG overshot both target and intended and style gravity but not dramatically so. With a 1.012 FG and 5.8% ABV, the net miss is only a fraction of a percent.
This one smells exactly right – a bounty of banana with hints of spice and grain. The initial flavor is equally on point. The banana yeast notes are the primary taste with a nice breadiness behind it. The wheat gives a fake full bodied effect. It’s round and creamy without being heavy. Something in the finish, sadly, seems just a bit off. There’s a slightly sour note that cuts to the edges of the tongue. I wouldn’t call it horribly unpleasant but it definitely doesn’t belong. Whatever it is, it does dissipate as I get further down the glass. I don’t know if that’s because carbonation accentuates the sour or if I’m just getting numb to it. I’m at a loss what the cause might be. The recipe is too simple to point to an ingredient, but I would expect an infection defect to be way more aggressive and pronounced. Maybe it was a fermentation temperature issue or perhaps too much time sitting on the yeast in primary.