The Apartment Homebrewer

Six weeks since brew day, the Passion Fruit American Wheat, an American-style wheat beer brewed with passion fruit, is finished and tasting great. It’s very refreshing, and just in time, since 90+ degree weather has hit Texas. A review and recipe below. Cheers, and happy brewing!

Review
Pouring into a tulip glass, the Passion Fruit American Wheat has an hazy, yellow appearance with fluffy, white head. The aroma is balanced, a mix of fresh, doughy bread and tropical fruits. In tasting, the beer has more of the same: clean wheat malt and tropical fruits. After 6 weeks, the finish is crisp, light, and clean with the just enough bitterness to balance the fruit and malt flavors. Overall, the Passion Fruit American Wheat turned out better than excepted, having never used fruit juice in a beer previously. I’ll likely keep this recipe unchanged for the next re-brew, which might come as soon as July in preparation for the Austin Zealots summer party.

Recipe Design
For a detailed recipe design overview, check out the brew day post linked here. In summary, the Passion Fruit American Wheat is a fruit beer, combining a basic American-style wheat beer recipe (seen below) with passion fruit juice added in the secondary. Through trial and error, I found that 2 L of good quality passion fruit juice provides good balance of beer and fruit flavors for a 5 gallon (19 L) batch.

Recipe: Passion Fruit American Wheat
5 Gallon Batch, all-grain
Stats: OG 1.048 FG 1.010 ABV 5.0% IBU: ~20, 85% mash efficiency

Grist
3.5 lbs Wheat Malt
2 lbs US 2-Row
1.5 lbs Pilsner Malt
2 L Passion Fruit juice (added to secondary)

Single-infusion mash at 152 F 60 min, mashout at 170 F 10 min

Hops
Boil addition of Magnum to get you to 20 IBUs

Yeast
1 packet of US-05, fermented at 68F

Water
Added 1 tsp gypsum to nice clean soft-ish water