January Brew Day

A friend and I started homebrewing two years ago next month. At the time, our interest was almost entirely in making Belgian-style ales. I think a lot of that was due to another friend's having bought me a copy of Brew Like a Monk a few years before. Over the last couple years we've made several different beers. I've done several brews alone, and we've done several together; branching out significantly from my original goal of brewing "Belgians".

But Belgian-style ales are still my favourite thing to drink.

So we decided to return to our original passion and make something vaguely Belgian right around Christmas. We wanted to make something high in gravity, which meant making a yeast starter. I'm no big fan of yeast starters: they always seem wasteful to me. So this time we decided to make "starter beer": something not too strong, to cultivate the yeast in preparation for something much stronger.

We made our "starter beer" in mid-November. We took a recipe that's floating around the Internet: "SWMBO Slayer". This is essentially a Belgian Wit, or maybe a Belgian Pale ale. We took that recipe, changed the yeast to the White Labs WLP500 we wanted to use, and added some sugar to try and up the gravity a touch. The recipe we finally used is on Hopville: here.

A month later, we bottled our "starter beer". It's a fantastic beer! We definitely want to make it again.

From Belgian Strong Dark Ale

It's pale, smooth, and mellow. It's much higher in alcohol than it looks or tastes: it's a beer to treat with respect.

The day we bottled our starter, we made our "Belgian Strong Dark Ale". We owe a lot of whatever success we have to Brew Like a Monk. Belgian beers are a great deal simpler than they appear when you drink them. Like a lot of newbies, we'd tried to get some of those complex flavours by adding all sorts of malts. And although we knew very well that Belgians brew with a lot of sugar, we'd always been afraid to really pour it in. One striking recommendation in B. Like a M. was to mash cool, and "convert all the way into the boil kettle." So we took a leaf from B. Like a M. and applied some principles it espouses:

1. we used Pilsner for our base malt (which is--- let's be honest--- my favourite base malt)
2. we used 14 pounds of base malt, and one pound of specialty malt
3. we used more than two pounds of sugar: 2 lb. 5 oz. of demerrara
4. we mashed really cool: 45 minutes at 145°F
5. we pulled two decoctions, ending up somewhere around 156°F
6. we skipped mash-out and ran off the first runnings at about 156°F
7. we sparged cool: 160°F

Our recipe is on Hopville: here.

The wort we made was rather heavy: specific gravity 1.093.

From Belgian Strong Dark Ale

That was a month ago. This last weekend, we opened the fermenter, siphoned out the beer, and bottled it.

Of course the first question is the final gravity. We measured it at 1.011. That's a tremendous drop in gravity: Hopville figures it at 10.9% ABV.

From Belgian Strong Dark Ale

I love the colour of this beer.

The taste was everything I'd been hoping for, but it's really boozey. I'm hoping that mellows in the bottle.

In the end we got almost twenty bottles, plus a 12-pack of singles. I like the singles with heftier beers, it makes it easier to sample and see how the conditiong is coming.

From Belgian Strong Dark Ale

This might not be ready for a few months yet, but I'm really looking forward to trying it.