Beer Forum

My beer club did a group brew where we created a fairly big wheat-wine, 1.100 OG - that we pitched a large amount of 1056 slurry to. It's righty around 1.020 now. Good stuff! I have my 5 gallon batch split between 2 5 gallon carboys to keep the overflow possibility to a minimum. It went like a forest fire for about 2 weeks, I swirled the carboys every day to keep the yeast in suspension and happily bubbling along. It's been about a month now and I'm looking at my next alternatives, thought I'd get some input. Everyone is responsible for aging their own and the idea is to see what everyone comes up with.

Rack both batches into a single carboy to get the beer off the yeast cakes or leave them the way they are for a while longer?
Bulk age at basement temperature (68 degrees) or chilling in the kegerator?
Dry hop later or not?

Anyone do anything like this before with good, solid suggestions? Thanks!

Personally, I don't like to let my high gravity beers sit on yeast for too long. With most beers I'd say leave it in the primary, even if you were dry hopping. But in this case, I'd recommend a transfer to secondary once primary's done if you plan to dry hop with pellets. Wheatwines can be good fresh, especially when dry hopped. But if this is something that you plan to age, then I'd advise skipping the dry hops entirely.

As far as aging the beer, colder is better IMO. So if you have kegs available and room in your kegerator, store it cold.

i just had a wheat wine for the first time a few weeks ago and i loved it. what sort of recipe did your club use? american hefe dialed up to barley wine strempth?

While still a newer style, American wheatwines are essentially American barleywines with a large portion of wheat in the grist. I think Marin's Star Brew is around 50-60% wheat malt.