Ok, this one was kind of out there and unique, and I’m certainly not someone to shy away from such challenges. This is what is says in the title. An apple pie wheat beer. The result, as some would say, tastes like apple pie. This beer was designed meticulously to try and replicate as much of an apple pie flavour as I could including the crust, while still tasting like a beer. In the case of this beer, I think I was about 80% successful, and I may make some modifications on my next revision.
This beer was brewed originally to work with the thanksgiving season. The season from my perspective, falling between the Canadian and United States thanksgiving holidays. What I think was nailed in this recipe was the apple cinnamon flavour. The pie crust flavour needs a little work, but it is almost there. Not far at all from being perfect.
As usual, the base malts involved was provided by Canada Malting Company, which included both their Superior Pale Ale malt, and their Wheat malt. The wheat beer format was chosen because wheat flour tends to be used in pie crust. To accent that flavour a bit more, I decided to introduce some Dingemans Biscuit malt. As a bit of a signature that I tend to do with most of my beers, I added honey malt and a touch of honey to the recipe to add some nice body and honey flavour into the beer.
Finally, the apples and seasonings. Typically when I brew with cinnamon, I add it as cinnamon sticks and treat them like hops. You can boil them or you can “dry hop” them. But since you aren’t going to get much bitterness from cinnamon, add it close enough to the end of the boil to extract flavour, but not so close that there is minimal contribution. In this case, I added spices in the last 5 minutes. I also added cinnamon to secondary. The apples were golden delicious, and in this recipe, I will point out the weight of them after roasting, since the weight dropped by quite a bit. I went with these apples because I didn’t want the apples to contribute any tartness in the beer.
I did have fairly bad efficiencies in this recipe (little over 50% instead of 68%), so I’ll post what the OG should have been and what the FG was.
Brew Stats
Original Gravity: 1.056
Final Gravity: 1.013
ABV: 5.6%
SRM: 8.5 (estimated)
IBUs: 22 (calculated)
Recipe
5 lbs (45.5%) – Canada Malting Superior Pale Ale
3.5 lbs (31.8%) – Canada Malting Wheat Malt
1.25 lbs (11.4%) – Dingemans Biscuit Malt
0.75 lbs (6.1%) – Gambrinus Honey Malt
0.5 lbs (4.5%) – Honey
1 oz – Sterling hops (6.7% A/A) (60 minutes)
1 stick – Cinnamon (5 minutes boil)
0.5 tsp – Nutmeg (5 minutes boil)
2 sticks – Cinnamon (secondary)
1.5 lbs – Golden Delicious apples (secondary)
Wyeast 1010 American Wheat
194.7 billion yeast cells estimated minimum requirement
Mashing
Grains should be mashed in a single infusion mash at 152ºF. Add an ample amount of rice hulls into the mash as well to aid in lautering. Do some googling and you’re likely to find a lot of stories of stuck sparges involving wheat malt. Add rice hulls. Lots of them. helps efficiencies too. Let mash for about 60 minutes. Sparge according to your equipment setup.
Boiling
Bring wort to a boil. Add your hops at the beginning just to add a touch of bitterness. At 5 minutes remaining, throw in your cinnamon and nutmeg. At flame-out, or immediately prior to chilling, add honey if it is solid honey. Add honey to the fermenter with wort if it is in liquid form. My honey was in solid form so I added it at flame out, which was also immediately prior to immersion chilling.
Fermentation and Finishing
Pitch your yeast or yeast starter, then aerate or oxygenate your wort. Room temperature is ideal for fermentation. I was around 65ºF for fermentation. It may finish fermenting for a few days, but let it sit for about 2 weeks. Be weary of exploding yeast. Wheat beers with wheat yeast, especially if you pitch a lot of it, will develop a massive krausen. I didn’t use a blowoff tube and had the biggest mess in my cabinet on the first day of fermentation.
Week 3, prepare your apples. Buy lots of them. I bought 8 lbs of apples, cut out the core and sliced them into thin and small slices. The apples were baked on a clean cookie sheet at 400ºF for about 15 minutes. You will most likely have to do this multiple times as that is a lot of apple. By the time roasting was done, I had about 1.5 lbs of soggy apple. Stuff all this apple into your secondary carboy with 2 sticks of cinnamon, then rack your beer on top. Let that sit for a week.
After this is complete, bottle or keg, carbonate, and enjoy a good thanksgiving beer!
