Cherry Wheat - Original date: 8/23/97

Me & Rob


Ingredients

• 4lb Ironmaster Wheat Beer Kit (from Shelby Beer & Wine Supply)


• 1oz Slovenian Styrian Golding Hops (Alpha Acid: 5.2%)


• 60oz Frozen "Big Valley" dark sweet cherries (5-12oz packages)

What We Did

• Started around 2PM on a bright sunny Saturday


• Brought 2 gallons of filtered tap water to a boil


• Added the hopped malt extract and the hops (in a strainer mesh bag)


• Had a beer


• Boiled for 1 hour


• Had a PB&J or two


• Washed out the plastic fermenter and sanitized


• Added the thawed cherries and steeped for 20 minutes (water actually started to boil again and I turned it off)


• Put 3 gallons of filtered cold water in the fermenter


• Poured the wort and cherries into the fermenter


• Put the lid loosely on the fermenter & set it on the floor


• Put a wet t-shirt around the fermenter and directed a fan toward it - temp 110F


• Several hours immersed in ice water - 9:03PM - Temp 80F


• Specific gravity - 1.030


• Woke up yeast for 10 minutes in boiled then cooled water (used microwave, then immersed the Pyrex measuring cup in water


• Pitched yeast

8/24/97

• 10:30AM - Bubbling like crazy!

8/26/97

• Bubbling stopped. Attached airlock.

9/4/97

• Bottled


• 74F - 1.004Hg

Contemporary notes -- August 2004

This beer was something of a disappointment to us because the cherry flavor wasn't very strong. It was a decent enough wheat beer, but we should have probably used three or four times as much fruit. We were trying to duplicate the level of 'cherryness' in Samuel Adams Cherry Wheat, and failed miserably.

This, incidently, is the first brewing session I recorded in my notes. There had probably been half a dozen or so sessions prior to this one when I got started sometime around 1995 in my bachelor pad apartment on Nicke St in Clinton Township, MI. None of those very first beers were particularly memorable, except for one that was brewed sometime in late 1996 or early 1997--a Guinness knock-off found in one of Charlie Papazian's books called 'Toad Spit Stout'. That beer was an unqualified success, and I think that it came at a time when I was almost ready to give up on homebrewing because I hadn't been terribly successful until that point. Unfortunately, I have only the vaguest recollections of the brewing of that beer...Angela's cousin April came with me (she was staying with us for a couple of weeks that summer) to pick up a plastic fermenter -- really a used pickle bucket from a restaurant on Gratiot Avenue! Despite its humble origins, that old bucket brewed some pretty decent beer until I replaced it a few years later with a store-bought fermenter.