if you're looking for a beer that's fruity
easy to make and perfect for a hot summer day then you're in the right place! I'm Trent
Musho and you're watching the bru sho. Stick around and learn how you can make this at home
right now we're in the dog days of summer and i was looking for something refreshing and easy
to sip on so i took a wheat ale recipe that i had and added five pounds of watermelon to it
as a cheers to summer. this is a perfect recipe for beginners or for your first all-green brew
if you're new to my page be sure to subscribe so you can learn more about how to brew your own beer
and get more great recipes like this. now let's brew! for this recipe i'll be using the brew in
a bag method and if you're not familiar with that be sure to check out my how to brew video i'll be
making a five and a half gallon batch but feel free to scale this up or down based on what you
want to start i take 6.9 gallons and heat it up to 161 degrees. once the water is heated up a bit i
add my water adjustments. this is an optional step but it can impact the final flavor of your beer
next i add the grain bag and then i add the grains i'm going to be using 56% pale malt and 40% wheat
malt in this case red wheat malt the reason i'm going so high with the wheat malt is i really want
that sweetness that the wheat malt gives. and now we'll round it out with 10% lovibond crystal malt
that's just to add a little more color i plan to mash at 154 degrees Fahrenheit for 45 minutes
this is to help accentuate the overall mouthfeel of the beer it can be a bit of a challenge to keep
your mask temperature consistent so what i try to do is occasionally i'll stir the mash to try
and keep the temperature even throughout the mash tun i'll also occasionally turn the burner back
on if i notice it drops too much for my target temperature. All right after the 45 minutes it's
time to pull the bag once you feel like you got everything go ahead and dump those grains
and prepare to boil for 15 minutes traditionally brewers tend to boil for about 60 minutes or
longer but since we're only going to use one hop and we're not trying to get too much bitterness
out of it we're only going to boil for 15 minutes. Speaking of hops once we've reached our boil we're
gonna add our one ounces of magnum and set our timer for 15 minutes the reason i went with magnum
here is because it has a clean bitterness and i don't want it to get in the way of watermelon
flavor. Have you guys ever had a watermelon beer before? Let me know in the comments below after
i throw in the hops i put in the wart chiller once the 15 minutes is up we'll turn off the burner and
turn on our wort chiller this is the wort chiller i built and i use a pump to recirculate the water
so when the cold water goes in it comes through the tubing and comes back out into the same bucket
and then i just replenish it with ice until it's cooled down to about 70 degrees at which point i
transfer into the fermenter. here i'm using a PET carboy but you can use a food grade safe bucket
they're one of the least expensive options and you can find them at your local hardware store
now i'll take a quick hydrometer reading to get the original gravity in this case it's 1.046
this number will help us determine our final alcohol percentage as well as let us know when the
beer is done fermenting for the yeast i'm going to use the SafAle US-05 standard ale yeast and
i like it because it doesn't impact too much flavor onto the beer and leaves you with a nice
refreshing ale then i shake up the fermenter to working some oxygen but remember to limit oxygen
exposure after fermentation has begun i pop an air lock on and i set it in a cool dark place
for about seven days to allow the yeast plenty of time to chew on those sugars.
a week later i noticed the airlock activity had slowed down so i took my
final gravity reading i got a 1.011 which means this beer clocks in at 4.6% alcohol.
so everything up into this point we made your standard wheat ale which means we're missing
one ingredient but before that we need to take a trip back in time one day ago
now for this recipe you're going to need to grow your own watermelon from seed...
nah just kidding you can use any watermelon that you have as long as it tastes good
these watermelon are called sugar baby they're supposed to be really sweet
and they grow pretty small compared to most watermelon this one weighs about five pounds.
next i cut the watermelon up into small cubes and froze them overnight. fast forward to the next day
we pull the watermelon out of the freezer and put them into sanitized hop socks or mesh bags.
the reason we froze the fruit is to kill off any bacteria that might be present on it.
putting the watermelon in the bag also keeps the seeds of the watermelon from getting in
our tubing. once the bags are filled up i added them to the keg close the keg up
connected the co2 tank and purged the keg. i did this a few times to make sure there's
no oxygen present in the keg. then i open it up and transfer the beer in like i normally would.
now if you're not kegging you can still do this you'll just need to use a secondary fermenter
you place the frozen watermelon into your secondary fermenter and then transfer the
beer into that fermenter. then after the watermelon has infused for a couple days
you can transfer into your bottles. since i'm just kegging i transfer the beer in close it up
i set my regulator to 10 psi let it sit for about a week and then it's ready to drink
what a beautiful color this beer has it's slightly gold with a bit of haze from that
wheat malt we used the mouth feels very smooth and creamy you almost get a hint of vanilla.
the melon flavor is subtle and doesn't hit you over the head if you want to change it
up try using peaches instead of watermelon i've tried it before and i really liked it.
you can experiment with all kinds of fruit. so please give this one a try and let me know if you
do and if you have any questions about the recipe or any of the brewing processes let me know in
the comments below and be sure to subscribe for more recipes and tutorials thanks for watching!