The Frosted Brew: Homemade Beer Made Easy

he Blueberry Breeze, as my regular readers will know, started life as a blueberry pale ale.  After the first batch though I decided that the pale ale was going to be do bitter for the blueberries I decided to convert the recipe to a wheat beer. 

One of the advantages of using a wheat beer instead of a pale ale is that wheat beers are traditionally hazy which is a problem with most fruit beers when you boil the fruit.  This can be minimized however by steeping your fruit in 170 degree water for 20 minutes to kill off any bacteria or wild yeast that may be present.

This recipe is an all-grain recipe.  If you would like an extract or partial mash version of the recipe leave a comment and I will convert it for you.  Alternatively, if you want to suggest some other tips and tricks for this recipe feel free to do so in the comments section.

Ingredients

• 6lbs Wheat Malt
• 2.5 lbs Crystal 10L
• 7lbs Fresh Blueberries
• 1 oz Cascade hops
• American Ale yeast

Brewing

I like to mash at 1.25 quarts per pound of water and this recipe should be mashed at around 155 degrees.  You will need just over 2.5 gallons for your mash water. There really isn’t much benefit to doing a multi-step mash so just heat your water and let the grains mash for an hour.

Depending on your set-up and your evaporation rate you may need to do one or two batch sparges.  Since I do a split boil I will end up losing nearly a full gallon during the hour boil.  If you don’t know your evaporation rate you can approximate at one half gallon per hour per kettle.  Thus is you boil in two kettles you will lose nearly a gallon in evaporation.

Trub loss will also be about a gallon between primary and secondary so you will want to collect enough wort to end up with a post boil volume of 6 gallons.  This will give you close to five gallons in your keg or bottles.

You will add half an ounce of hops at the start of the boil and the other half at the five minute mark.  You can use Irish Moss (1 tsp at 15 minutes) if you would like but it’s not really required.

Fermentation

You will want to do one week in the primary and two weeks in the secondary.  You will be adding the fruit to the secondary so first crush the blueberries and then steep in 170 degree water for 20 minutes.  Add the mixture to your secondary fermenter and rack your beer on top of it. After two weeks you will be ready to keg/bottle.

Carbonation

This beer does really well with low to medium carbonation.  I recommend using 4  to 6 oz of Pale dry malt extract to carbonate (if bottling).  For kegging you should use between 5 to 7 oz of Pale dry malt extract.  This recipe will need at least 14 days in the bottle to be drinkable and 21 days in the bottle to be really good.

The target OG for this beer is 1.040 and the assumed efficiency is 75%.  The estimated SRM is 4.8.

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