For a while now, I have been malting and toasting my own grains for all my beers. I think the official count is the last eight batches have been made from only home malt. Suck on that, overpriced homebrew shop! The only problem is the fact that I tend to jump into things full-force, like an action star jumping out of the third story window of a burning building while rescuing a baby. Sure, in the end it turns out great, but I don't take the time to think things through and take notes, so when I go to repeat the process, I could end up with a totally different beer. Or using the same analogy, I could end up with a broken leg and a dead baby.

OK, maybe not that bad, but with all of my home malted beers I have been putting in two to four specialty malts, roasted for different lengths of time. This becomes a problem because in the end I don't really know which malt is having the greatest effect on the color and taste of my finished beers. And now that the burning obsession with home malting has died down, its time to get serious and start learning the effects of toasting and roasting on my beers.

So with all that in mind, over the last couple of weeks I made two wheat beers: a dunkleweizen and a hefeweizen. The hefeweizen recipe looked like this:

2.4 lb pale malt
2.4 lb wheat malt
Mt Hood/Goldings to 15 IBU

Easy enough. Mashed in the mid 50's. I racked this one over to "secondary", which basically means I want to free up my buckets and look at my pretty beer in a see through container, and it looks like this:

The dunkleweizen was essentially the same recipe, BUT (and I know I already talked about this in my last post) I roasted half of the wheat malt in the oven @ 400 degrees for 30 minutes. Differnent hop schedule too, but this experiment was more about color, so that doesn't matter. I JUST racked that one over to the OMGlookatmyprettybeerbottle a few minutes ago and it looks like THIS!
Big difference! Also, the sample tasted great. Roasted wheat is something I have never been able to use since it doesn't really exist at a homebrew shop, and it is VERY interesting.

Both beers taste awesome and I am pumped to keg them. Actually, now I think it will be easier for me to continue to let my pumpkin beer age until Thanksgiving, since I know I have these two great beers on deck!

Alright, I gotta go work on getting a keg empty so I can get one of these going... PEACE!