Adding Hops - Mr. Beer German Hefeweizen

For batch #7, I wasn't quite ready to move on from Mr. Beer (I still had several cans of the stuff, after all), but I was pretty damn comfortable with steeping grains. I decided to add some hops, though to be fair they're mostly vestigial. Mr. Beer recipes are already hopped - add too few and you won't notice a difference, add too many and you completely mask the original recipe they designed.

I decided to do the Mr. Beer German Hefeweizen recipe. I had a can of Whispering Wheat sitting around, the hop schedule is super simple and it gave me a chance to try liquid yeast. Besides, I love hefeweizens!

I decided to do a 15-minute flavor boil of Hallertauer 4.3% AA and add a couple of pounds of DME to the Whispering Wheat HME can. I replaced the Wyeast with the White Labs equivalent, WLP300.

I learned two things. First, boiling hops is dead simple, and there's no reason not to do it. Second, a single vial of liquid yeast is the perfect size for a 2.5 gallon batch! A starter is only recommended when doing a 5 gallon batch of particularly high gravity beer. A single vial ($5.75 at MoreBeer, ouch) gave me an explosive fermentation in less than a day.

One last thing I tried in this batch was FermCap-S, and now I can't live without it. There was no massive boilover in the pot after adding DME when I added 5 drops to the pot, and I was able to fill the fermenter nearly to the top without the krausen overflowing. WLP300 is known as an especially active yeast, so I have no doubt that without the FermCap I would have ended up with beer covering my walls.

So, three new tools were added to my post-Mr. Beer toolset: liquid yeast, pellet hops and FermCap-S.