Cherry Wheat
My Nephew and I brewed last weekend. Seems this is his last batch before going all electric brew kettle for his next recipe. I agreed to help wire his AC control panel; and in exchange, will receive one of his high power burners. My burner suffers from a 30K BTU syndrome and the new, 200K BTU rocket will be a nice addition for brewing the next batch.
For the cherry wheat, or beer at all, I'm not a big fan of adding fruit into the batch. But he has his tastes and wants to enter a home brewing competition near his home. So the added 7 lb of brewing cherries more than doubles the price of the grain bill.
Additionally, we brewed a Belgian several weeks ago that I’ve included images. One I lovingly call Frankenstein. It started off as a session ale but after adding a lot of honey into the secondary, we figured the ABV goes much beyond the style guidelines of that beer. That all grain recipe called for spice additions of pepper-corns, ginger root, star anise and raw honey--most of which, after several weeks of fermentation are now undetectable to taste-sampling during last weeks brewoff meeting.
So keeping track,
Cherry Wheat, all grain, 11 gallons --brew date, March 18
Kolsch, 10 gallons --brew date March 11
Frankenstein, aka Sesion ale/Belgian --brew date February 2.
None except the sesion ale-turned-strong Belgian, we sipped for a thumbs up.