Tuesday night, Jesse, Ryan and I bottled the Hefe and everything went smooth as silk. Bottling is so much easier and more enjoyable with extra hands. Having three people made the process faster. Jesse's new house has a dishwasher with a sanitise cycle and we used it to give the bottles a final rinse. We of course still used sanitizer, but thought the extra precaution couldn't hurt.We decided to use Wheat Dehydrated Malt Extract (DME) as priming sugar. Priming sugar is added at the time of bottling in order to carbonate and "bottle condition" the beer. There is enough residual yeast in the beer at the time of bottling that this sugar addition reactivates them. The yeast consume the sugar and their waste products are alcohol and CO2. The CO2 provides the carbonation for the bottled beer.
Our Final Gravity reading was 1.010 before adding the priming sugar and that is only 1 point off of the expected reading of 1.009. So, we must have done something right with this beer. As mentioned in a previous post, we did not take an initial gravity reading, so the exact ABV is unknown. Based on the recipe and our final gravity reading, we are estimating 5.4%. A sample was tasted and while still young, it seems like it's going to be a decent wheat beer. Our efforts resulted in 98 12oz bottles capped and ready for labels.
As a side experiment, we decided that the left over yeast looked too good to throw away, so we used some of it in a cider experiment. 1 gallon of Mott's apple juice, half a bear of honey and a generous does of left over Hefeweizen yeast and trub were the ingredients. We combined in a 1 gallon glass carboy, shook to mix and aerate and capped it with a bung and airlock. Less than 8 hours later it was in active fermentation with the airlock bubbling away about once a second. Should be interesting!-Josh
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