What a Week of Brewing

Well a lot sure has happened in my brewing sphere this week.  First off, I took the Hefeweizen that I had fermenting the past 3 weeks, and racked it ontop of 6lbs of blueberry puree.  Yes, I know that it was supposed to be blackberry nectar this time around, but a dear friend of mine is moving to Virginia, and she hadn't gotten to try the Blue Eyed Wheatie.  For this particular batch, I doubled the amount of puree that I used.  I did this for a couple reasons.  First I wanted to add a bit more blueberry flavor to the beer.  The first batch I did only had 3lbs and you couldn't really taste the blueberry until the finish.  Second, I wanted to add more berry color to the beer.  I used all pale color base malts along with the wheat, so that it would help take more color from the berry in the finished product.  It is going to sit on the puree for about two weeks, and then I will rack it off to an empty keg, and let it age a week before putting it in the beer fridge, and carbing it up to 2.3 volumes.  The next thing that happened in my brewing this week was the introduction of a friend to the hobby.  He had always enjoyed drinking my beers, and was interested in seeing how it was done.  For our brew,  I chose to brew an All Grain Dunkelweizen from Northern Brewer.  I walked Bill through all of the steps of a Brew Day from Mashing In, Sparging, Boiling, Hops, Chilling, Pitching, and finally Sanitization, and all the work that goes into producing a quality brew.  At the end of the day, we spent a few hours outside on a 30 degree Indiana night, tossed back a few home brews, and checked our troubles at the door.  On the Dunkel, we had a decently successful mash.  For some reason I am only able to get about 60 percent efficiency out of my current cooler setup.  I think it may have something to do with the SS braid floating up into the mash, and I'm leaving some thick malty wort in the bottom of the 5 gal rectangular rubbermaid cooler.  I'm open to any thoughts on ways to get that number up.  I'd really like to get 70 percent efficiency.  On the next batch, I am going to ask for a finer crush from NB.  I'm interested in seeing if that would help make a difference.  Anyways, we ended up 5.25 gallons of sweet dark wheat wort in the fermenter, and pitched some Wyeast 3068 that I had harvested from the recently completed Hefeweizen that is now on the blueberries.  So, it's been a successful brew week.  

Cheers!