Torrified wheat

[nigel_c]

Am building up a nice starter of harvested hoegaarden yeast to brew some time this week. I have a bag of torrified wheat but am finding mixed results using it in a witbier. Anyone care to enlighten me?

[Stitch]

I have used this for head retention. The thing I found was that it has no distastic power so adds no enzymes to the mash It has to be mashed with another grain that adds enzymes while mashing.

Hope this helps.

[mr hoppy]

I did a wit last summer that was:

40% lager malt
40% torrified wheat
10% flaked oats
5% munich malt
5% acid malt (which was probably a mistake)

As Stitch says torrified wheat has no diastatic power so you need to do a cereal mash with some base malt to get it to convert. If you're only using a small % of wheat it shouldn't make much of a difference though. I found doing a cereal mash was good crack - like doing a decoction you've got to keep stirring because you are basically making porridge for an hour plus. I thought the torrified wheat probably did add to the beer - although I'm not sure if I'd use more than 2.5% acid malt again.