Yesterday we brewed up a 28L batch of a witbier/saison/pale ale hybrid. The brewday did not go smoothly at all, and we had a ton of problems with the mash (too low temperature, poor flow rate through the bed, and poor efficiency). I think most mash problems were a result of us using raw wheat. A cereal mash might have helped? The beer will most likely ferment very dry, since our mash temperature was really low for most of the mash (60-62 C). We couldn’t recirculate (and thus raise the temperature) throughout most of the mash because of poor flow through the malt bed. We also must have measured the sparge volume wrong, since we ended up with closer to 40 litres pre-boil volume, instead of the intended 30 liters. This resulted in us gaining 7 liters more wort in the fermenter, and a gravity of 1.046 instead of around 1.060-1.065. The problems did not end there, as we cooled the wort to around 23C, pitched a healthy starter of WLP566 Saison II, and set the vessel in the fermenting cabinet with the thermostat set to 24C. The next day I realized the heater was not on, and the wort temperature had dropped to 16C. I turned on the heater, and hopefully something drinkable will at least come out of this batch. The spice mixture (Szechuan pepper, lime peel and lemongrass) was smelling really nice and ‘refreshing’ at least. Hopefully it transfers well to the beer! We hopped the beer with Galaxy in ‘APA amounts’, so this should get a healthy amount of bitterness (~40 IBU) and some nice hop aromas to go with the spicyness from the yeast and the citrus from the spice mixture. Anyways, here is the recipe:

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