I do quite enjoy a Belgian-style white ale (#witbier) during summer, with the coriander and orange spice profile over a bright, crisp wheat which just hits right in hot weather. So I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to review Nit Wit White Ale from BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse, which I received from the company recently.

https://www.thebrewsite.com/bjs-brewhouse-nit-wit-white-ale/

#Beer #CraftBeer #BeerReviews

Someone needs to explain to me how my local market sells 4-packs of 16 oz cans of Allagash White for $11.99, and individual 19.2 oz cans for $2.69/ea. #beer #Bier

Also, have I mentioned that I love #witbier?

#JanifasKitchen are with back us this weekend at our brewpub on Wells Road, with an Indian Thali and small plates menu. Check out the menu online, pictured is the Chaat masala pancakes.

Food will be available Friday and Saturday evening so why not pop in after the #SixNations matches? We may also have a couple of our old favourite brews on tap and cask, brewed just downstairs.

#BS4 #Totterdown #bristolstreetfood #bristolvegans #bathvegans #meatfree #indianstreetfood #BluesExplosion #witbier

After this first attempt at a witbier I set out to tune the recipe to try to fix what went bad last time. But while thinking about tuning down the coriander I considered replacing it entirely by something else entirely to give the beer a bit of a distinctive flavour. In a witbier the coriander is here to provide a bit of an herbal flavour so my eyes went for plants used for herbal teas. Living in Ireland, my preference would have been for Red Clover which I see oftentimes growing a bit everywhere but it turned out to be tricky to source in a dried form to make tea. Instead what I could find is Raspberry leaves so this is what this brew would be about.

Brew day, August 4th 2023

The raspberry leaves is the main difference compared to Witbier #1 but I also changed two other things:

• Use Tettnanger hops as they provide the right cocktail of flavours (spicy, floral, herbal) and they came up as warmly recommended for this style in this book. Witbier are not much about hops and I use very little of them but I expected it to indeed work well
• Remove the rice hulls as last time it seems the mash could work well enough without them
• Mash at higher temperature in the hope that this will increase head retention

Here we go for the grain then:

That went in with 2.5L of RO water for a 60 minutes mash at 67 degrees Celsius. After a sparge with 4.5L of RO water I moved to a 60 minutes boil with the following additions:

At the end when everything had cooled down I added 3g of Lallemand wit to this wort reaching a gravity of 10.44

Bottle day, August 20th 2023

After a few days fermenting the final gravity was at 10.02, accounting then for around 4.5 % ABV. I did a batch prime with 30g of priming sugar dissolved in 200ml of water and bottled everything up in 500ml bottles. For the label I tried to use Adobe Firefly to generate a frame illustrating the ingredients:

Tasting

The first bottle got open on the 25th and was very flat. This confirmed it’s best to stick to the 2 weeks rule for bottle carbonation. The following bottles tasted later had for feedback an overall pleasant taste but, for some, too much of a raspberry flavour. This indeed came through as surprisingly quite intense! For the next brew I’ll try to do everything the same except cut the amount of leaves in half (5g instead of 10g).

https://conceptfermentationlab.wordpress.com/2023/11/14/witbier-2/

#1 #Beer #Witbier