Well let's start with a little story. I ordered ingredients for my next batch of beer, a hefeweisen, from a online retailer that will remain nameless. I also bought a wort chiller, and I believe based on a lack of padding, something on the chiller put a couple of holes in one of the bags of DME. (Which then got rained on and made a rather sticky mess, but that's besides the point.) Well I contacted the retailer, and they shipped replacement ingredients. In the meantime I managed to salvage probably up words of 2.75 lbs of DME from the 3 lbs bag that was open, and there was nothing wrong with the other 3 lbs bag, or the 1 oz of hops after a little bit of rinsing. So here is my dilemma, I was planning a 5 gallon batch of hefeweisen, with a simple recipe - 6 lbs wheat DME, 1 oz Spalt @60 min, and pitch wlp300. Now I have nearly 12 lbs of wheat DME, and 2 oz of spalt hops (3.2% AA). I can obviously make the beer I was planning on making before, and save the extra ingredients for later, but I'm not sure how long it will take me to go through the first 5 gallons - last time it took me all football season, or how long after that before I am ready to make another batch of the same thing. So I started thinking of other things to do with the extra ingredients, but all I have come up with is a imperial hefewiesen so to speak, and just double everything in the recipe. Somehow I don't think that would turn out well, brewcipher has that leading to an OG of 1.10, and 10% ABV and only 16 ibus. So in the end I am looking for other options to use my ~5.75 lbs of wheat DME and 1 oz of 3.2% AA Spalt. I am certainly open to adding other ingredients to these. Any suggestions?
Brew your Hefe as planned. Divide the extra DME into 1# and 0.5# ziplocks and store in the freezer for starters. Use the hops as a late addition in your Hefe or just store them in the freezer. They will still be good in a few months.
Saving for starters was another possibility I had in mind. Is it necessary/useful to store DME in the freezer? I assumed it would be fine for quite some time at room temp.
Once I open a bag of DME, I have to put unused in freezer bc of the virtually year round high humidity. The opened bags get gooey outside the freezer. I only buy 1# and 0.5# bags of dme now for starters, but i guess, out of habit, still store in the freezer. Plus, I like it because it is convenient be the freezers in my serving and fermenting fridges stay almost empty. Hops, definitely store in freezer for long term storage.
I would use half the extra DME for an imperial hefe, store the other half for starters. And use all those hops for 60 or even 90 minutes, if you have to throw in some Hallertau or other German hops to bring it up to 25 IBU's. Ferment it as cool as possible and you'll have a great beer.
So I think I came up with a great idea. What do you guys think about doing a minimash with a few pound each of munich and wheat (and maybe some other stuff) add the remaining 5.75 lbs of DME, and pitching this on the cake left over from my hefe and call it a weizenbock.
My first reply(deleted) was to brew a weizen dopplebock, but then I started thinking about yeast, fermentation temps(lager temps) so I suggested the imperial hefe which is just a weizen bock brewed with hefe yeast instead of bock yeast.
