Feral Wit

I decided to brew a wheat beer with my wild yeast strain. I’ve decided to label my wild yeast beers under the name Feral, and for this beer I sort of wanted to brew a Belgian Style Wit, even though it turned out to be somewhat almost completely off style.

It had been a little while since I brewed and some of my ingredients had been misplaced so I ended up brewing this “Wit” with 4 pounds of wheat malt extract and a half pound of roasted barley that I had left over from a previous beer. So not exactly the traditional Wit grain bill. I also had a bunch of ‘aged’ cascade hops from my hop vine (yes, I know it’s really a bine, but no one knows what a bine is) I had ‘aged’ them by baking them at the lowest temp my oven would allow (170F) for like 10 hours. So I used those. So wrong hops, wrong grain bill except for the base wheat malt, how is this a Wit again? Oh, I added a half oz of orange peel and crushed coriander seeds at the end of the boil and left them in the primary for the fermentation.

After the boil I took a gravity reading and it was pretty low (1.02 something) so I beefed it up to 1.033 with the addition of some corn sugar. I tossed in the remains of my original wild yeast from the jar I had first cultivated it in, including the dessicated remains of the grapes the yeast originally rode in on.

It fermented slowly in my effing freezing house (avg temp 55F) for a couple of months and fermented down to 1.007 leaving a residual alcohol of about 3.5% ABV.

The taste is really good, very smooth, if that makes any sense. The orange and coriander are there but not quite enough to really identify the specific spices. It has a nice hop bitterness and a good wheat malt flavor. The color is a nice red/amber with a big foamy head.

The bottle label (if I ever get around to printing some):