It could be turned into Weißbier. I just spent a while looking at various sources online (like this site: (
http://www.howtobrew.com/section4/chapter19-3.html)), and couldn't determine an easy way to calculate the total amount of beer that could be produced with 35 bushels of wheat, though I don't feel that the time was wasted.
What I have found indicates that most weizens are made from a mix of barley and wheat. This is because wheat "must be mashed with barley as it does not contain the enzyme to convert its starches to soluble sugar and needs to “borrow” these enzymes from the barley" (
http://homebrewandbeer.com/ingredients.html). There may be different ratios depending on the recipe (German tradition requires a minimum of 50% wheat (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hefeweizen#Weissbier)), but a 60/40 split will be used for my purposes here, based on the recipe on the link above for "Three Weisse Guys - American Wheat Beer". This recipe is for a 4.5 gal batch (the site claims the batch will bottle into 48 12 oz. bottles, which is also 36 pints).
Based on the information I found, there is approximately 80-90% yield from malt to brew (I won't need to use this efficiency, as it's already assumed in the total 4.5 gal yield). In addition, as far as I can tell, there is about 79% yield from raw wheat to malt, and barley is similar. I will be assuming this yield to be 80%.
This recipe calls for 6 lbs. Wheat Malt extract (60% wheat 40% barley).
So, for 6 lbs. of Wheat Malt extract, we have a 4.5 gal yield. But 6 lbs. is the combined amount of 60% wheat and 40% barley, malted with an efficiency of 80%. Using the 80% efficiency, we'd need to start out with 7.5 lbs. of the 60/40 mix of raw barley and wheat (6 lbs. / .80). Because we only need to consider the wheat here, we need 60% of the 7.5 lbs. of raw grain, or 4.5 lbs. of raw wheat to yield 5 gal of this recipe (7.5 lbs. *.6).
Okay, so for every 4.5 lbs. of raw wheat, when added to various other ingredients and processed accordingly, will give us 4.5 gal of beer. So we have a surprisingly easy number to work with - a 1:1 ratio of raw wheat to gallons of beer!
Now to determine how much wheat you have in lbs. 1 bushel of wheat os about 60 lbs. (
http://www.wheatfoods.org/AboutWheat-wheat-facts/Index.htm). If you send M&T 35 bushels of wheat, that would be 2100lbs. of wheat, which could yield 2100 gal. of beer, or 22,400 bottles or 16,800 pints.
Of course, with 4 semi's and seven 10 ton truck loads, that would make a whole lot of hefeweizen, but since I don't know how much the semi's were filled to, it's hard to quantify. I'll try to quantify it anyway! I found one source that said their "semi trailer can hold about 1200 bushels" (
http://home.earthlink.net/~rghayes/perlingerphotos.html), and another that runs "two semi's one has takes about 1000 bushels on a tandem and the other is tridem which takes about 1500" (
http://combineforums.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=grainhandling&action=print&thread=16568). Assuming the 1200 bu is average for a semi, the Net bushels for 4 semi's is 4800 bu. Using the conversion of 36.74371 bu. of Wheat per metric ton (
http://www.smallgrains.org/WHFACTS/convert.htm), since there were 7 10 ton trucks, this adds another 2572 bu (36.74 bu/ton * 70 ton). In all, a full haul of the complement of 4 semi's and 7 10 ton trucks is about 7372 bu (nice guesstimate Southpaw!).
The total amount of beer you can produce with that mount, if my numbers are accurate (which they probably aren't) is 442,320 gal or 3,538,560 pints or 4,718,163 bottles!
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