Having a mother-in-law that lives in Germany has got its perks 🙂
I’ve been wanting to do an experiment with different yeast for a while now, and when my mother-in-law told us she’s on her way here in a month, I though its the perfect opportunity to get some yeast from Germany.
I met a guy called Max in the Altmuhltal area of Germany on my trip in 2012…he knew all the brew-masters from the breweries in his area. So, a few calls later, he managed to organize me some yeast and my mother-in-law brought it down to Cape Town in some newspaper and ice bricks.
My experiment was to brew a single batch of beer and then to split it into 3 fermenters, adding 3 different types of yeast to each carboy.With my plan in action, I thought it would be a good idea to make a proper starter for the 3 x different types of yeast.
A stir plate seemed easy to make, and had almost everything i needed at home already.
- 12v PC fan
- strong magnet
- rheostat (25ohm)
- on/off switch
- old ice-cream container
- 12v power supply
- stir bar (bought from
And voila !!!
There also a great tutorial here: BYO – DIY stir plate
I bought some more liquid yeast from Beerguevara (also weiss) and also some dry yeast – Safbrew WB-06. I made my starters for the two liquid yeasts about 2 days before brew day, and rotated them every few hours on the stir plate. (dry yeast dont need a starter)
On brew day I followed a simple weiss beer recipe and split the batch into 3 carboys.
I kept the 3 carboys together in a box I built…summer time is easy for brewing weiss beer as the temperature never drops below 20 degrees and pretty stable in my man-cave downstairs.
The first one to react was the yeast from Germany, and as you can see from the picture below, the foam came through the airlock after just a few hours.
The results:
I bottled all the beer and waited about a month before opening them…all in all, the beers all came out OK. They all had completely different flavor profiles, but not exactly what i was looking for, but very interesting not the less.
I’m very fussy when it comes to weiss beer and just haven’t come close to making a weiss beer that tastes similar to beers like Paulaner, CBC etc. I have brewed so many weiss beers by now, but still cant get that similar taste. The banana and clove are all there, but something is still missing.
One day I WILL make that perfect weiss 🙂
DIY ROELIE 