So for those wondering what "brett weizenbock" and "hopfen-weisse clone" were, they were two beers that I brewed on October 7th during an eight hour brewday which will be a fairly long time in the making but I am pretty excited/happy with. the Hopfen-weisse Clone is a clone of a Brooklyn Brewery Collaboration with Schneider in germany and my second experimental brew; a weizenbock conditioned with Brettanomyces and aged on oak cubes.
The Hopfen-Weisse Clone is based on a collaboration beer made between Brooklyn Brewery and Schneider, a pretty well regarded German brewery famous for the weizenbock Aventinus. If your not familiar with weizenbocks they are big wheat beers (7-10%) that often have a more complex malt base ( they usually throw in more of those biscuity, caramel notes, spiciness or the dark fruit flavors you can from dubbels and quads. The Hopfen-Weisse collaboration was basically a lighter weizenbock (didn't have quite as much of the dark fruit) with the very distinctive hefeweizen yeast profile but then hopped up with a lot of Amarillo, so it kind of had that banana clove up front malt sweetness of a heavy hefeweizen that then faded into some serious hop citrus.
the Brett-Conditioned Weizenbock, is really an experiment of mine that really hasn't been attempted much by commercial brewers but is based off of my experiences with several beers.
example that kind of sparked my interest in this was Cisco’s Lady of the Wood which sort of a double wit aged in chardonnay barrels and exposed to some bacteria and brett. What is really essential to what I’m trying to accomplish is having a soft expressive yeast profile upfront that then shifts into a cutting tartness. I feel this could have been done with many different yeast and malt profiles, a big witbeir, hefeweizen, Saison or Belgian golden ale would all be a medium in which such an event could happily occur. All of these I wouldn’t mind looking back on but I thought it would be best to pick what was in my opinion, the most upfront and clovey yeast. I chose this attempt in a weizenbock because I thought I could also combine certain characteristics that I loved in Orval.
Orval is a trappist beer which partially ferments and conditions with brettanomyces. What I found so amazing about Orval was its biscuity and nutty sweetness that shifts into some brett tartness and prominent hop bitterness for a Belgian. I thought that many of the sweeter and more complex malt aspects of a weizenbock could perform a similar juxtaposition to the brett as Orval’s malt profile did. However, given my unfamiliarity with wheat beers, my uncertainty with my experimental assumptions, and still being stuck on an extract system and not trusting my partial mash skills I decided to keep the malt profile simple this go around and copied the Hopfen-Weisse fermentables recipe. I plan on using Brettanomyces bruxellensis in the secondary which gives off medium sourness and brett characteristics. I also plan on using about 2 oz. of French medium toast oak cubes. In order to gain some brett and oak character I’ll probably have to let this sit for 3-6 months. I've read that when people brew hefeweizens, they usually skip the conditioning period in which the yeast cleans up and eliminates the phenols it produced during fermentation because it is the banana clove phenols that are expected in hefeweizens. Since it is likely that the hefeweizen yeast characteristics will fade in that amount of time I will probably blend a freshly fermented hefeweizen in order to achieve that quality again especially if it gets over oaked.
