1507 Belgian Ale Recipe (Dubbel)(2)
OK, so the procedure here is pretty easy. While you’re brewing, drink a few beers and save the sediment from the bottom of the bottle. The yeast are dormant here, but I’m hoping they’ll wake up a bit. I “fed” them a little of the first bit of wort as I brewed, a little of the first mash at a gravity of 1.045, but I’ll get into that later. Basically, this recipe has a large grain bill and once again, without a large brewpot, I had to do things in multiple boils. I stared with the pilsner malts, so about 7-8lbs boiled at a step-mash of 125-155-170. I repeated this again with the remaining malts, with the same step infusion. After the first boil I had about 2 gallons of wort at 1.045 gravity, which I then poured into a new primary fermenter (I bought some new equipment!) and sealed while I mashed out the remaining malts. Once I finished the remaining malts, I had a gravity around 1.042 or so.
After this, I began to add everything else. I boiled at 165-160F the Styrian golding hop pellets, but first I added the malto dextrin, the ‘Belgian candi”, which is really just caramelized rock candy, the Dark malt DME and brewed for 45 minutes. Then I added the Hallertau hop pellets for a 15 minute boil to release the aromatics and added a teaspoon of the Irish Moss.
At this point, I mostly submerged the brewpot in the sink filled with cold water (Ice cubes, cold water, ice packs in the water) to rapidly bring down the temperature. Once the temperature reached 80F, I mixed in the sediment from the Rochefort bottles, mixed thoroughly. Then I mixed in the White Labs Trappist ale yeast, stirred vigorously for up to a minute and sealed the container. The final gravity in the entire wort ends up being 1.072, which will give me something like 7.5% abv, SRM around 14.2 and IBUs about 23. I plan on letting this ferment 7-10 days, at 67F in the house, before moving it to the secondary for a few days. I want to see how the beer looks before I decide further, but I may just move right from the primary to the secondary for only a short period of time and bottle within the week, but we’ll know in a bit!
**Since I was very slow in posting this, I can explain what has happened… the beer was bottled in the meantime! I gave it 7 days in the primary, when I moved it to a secondary glass carboy. The Gravity was about 1.009 at this time, giving me around 8.5% abv for this brew. After 4 days downstairs at cool temperatures (I was helped by a cold front), where the downstairs was probably around 62 degrees on average, I bottled the beer. Why not let it sit longer, you ask? Well, I don’t really need to. As a Belgian style, it can have a haze when it pours, so I don’t need it to clear, and at 1.009 gravity… well, it cant really go much lower! So I bottled, notably in 12, 1L flip-top bottles as well as a few other smaller bottles, for taste testing The beer had an amazing aroma, with that classic belgian yeasty and fruity aroma mixed in with some more specific aromas of figs and traditional ‘darker’ fruits. The color did not come out as dark as I had hoped, possibly because of the use of amber instead of dark Belgian Candi, but it is a nice dark golden color and definitely smells delicious. I can hardly wait another week or so before popping one open to see how it is turning out!
