New brew: Belgium strong ale

Another brew for Xmas; “Krispy Belgium Strong Ale” is now in the fermenter, and is still bubbling strongly 3 days later.

I wanted to have a couple of strong (8-9%) ales for Xmas, all bottled in my new green 1 litre bottles – better than 2 litres I had been using, as a) you can control how much you drink easier – without having to leave half opened stuff), and b) less chance of yeast mixing, as you probably only pour twice, rather than 4 or 5 times with a two litre, each time mixing more and more yeast in.

Some of the ingredients in my 'brew box'

Ingredients for this brew were (as my previous 2 beers, no recipe – just my own decisions);

• 2 x 1.5kg of light malt extract
• 1.5kg of belgium candy sugar
• 300g of extra light dried malt
• 250g of Belgium ‘Special B’ malt grains
• 300g of light crystal malt grains
• 50g Brewers gold hops (fairly high acid bittering hops)
• 50g Saaz hops (famous continental ‘lager’ flavour/aroma hops)
• Wyeast Belgium Abbey ale liquid yeast (1214)
• 5g of irish moss (add last 15 mins boil to help clear proteins)

The candy sugar is in there to give the beer the strength, without making it too full bodied – belgium beer is often very strong but not over malty – they use sugar to add alcohol without dominating the beer with malt making it heavy).

Yeast Starter (brewing technique helper)

I have used another liquid yeast, as while they are expensive, they are meant to be very true to type giving better results than dried yeast.  They do recommend making a ‘yeast starter’ though – as the 25 billion yeast cells are not quite enough to really get your fermentation going quickly (for a standard UK 5 gallon batch).  To make a yeast starter, I did the following;

Yeast starter

• Prepare liquid yeast (smack the pack 3 hours before as instructed, to mix yeast with nutrients, and leave in warm (25c) place.
  • If doing this with dried yeast, rehydrate, add yeast to cooled boiled water and leave covered for 30 – 45 mins, stirring only after first 15 mins.
• sanitise a small container – I’m using a £5 glass jar which just about takes 2 litres of liquid.
• get a medium saucepan, and too it;
  • add 150-200g of dried malt extract (better than sugar as closer to what the yeast will be eating in your main brew)
  • add 1.5-2 litres of boiling water (I don’t want to completely fill my container!)
  • Boil for 10 minutes
• Pour the boiling liquid malt into the glass jar
• COOL!  (I carefully put the glass jar in a sink of cold water)
• Once down to between 21-25c;
  • Seal container, and SHAKE!  You want to get a lot of oxygen into it – but be careful not to make a mess!
  • add the yeast (from smack pack or rehydration container)
• Leave in a warm dark place for 2-3 days!
  • for my belgium yeast between 20-24c)

The yeast will ferment the mixture, eating up all the sugars in the malt, and multiplying out in the oxygen rich wort.  This will give you upto 2 litres of yeasty mixture!

For this brew I was using a new thermometer – as I managed to break my previous one!  This time it was a probe and electronic unit one from Lakeland – and it’s really the business.  The probe is on a fairly long wire to the unit, and the unit acts as a timer, and readout, and also you can set max / min temps in it to monitor for, and it will beep when they are reached.

Monitoring temperature with new gizmo

So during the making of the beer, after adding the water and grains to the boiler, I set the upper limit alarm to 65c, and turned the heater to full.  I went off to read, and when the ideal steeping temp is reached, the alarm went off, and I could then set the heater back down to 2-3, to just maintain that 65 temp.  I then set the timer to 20 mins, and left it like that… alarm told me it was time to remove the grains and turn up the heat!

I then added the 2 cans of malt extract (which i had in boiling water for 20 mins to soften up the mixture inside), the 1.5kg of candy sugar (bit by bit as the water kept heating, stiring it in to help it disolve!), and some dried malt extract too which I had left over.

Once the wort was reaching close too boiling, I added 50g of my bittering hop (brewers gold – a popular German lager hop), and boiled for 75 mins.  I then added my wort chiller to sanitise, and 5g (one teaspoon) of Irish moss.  After 5 mins, the first 40g of Saaz hops for flavour, and then 9 mins later 10g more Saaz for a bit of hop aroma.  Heat off 1 min later (for a total 90 min boil), and then cold water turned on to chill the wort down.  I could use my new temp probe to tell me when it had reached 25c – very handy.

So once chilled, my wort is ready.  I quickly took a hydrometer reading – doing it now as there isn’t any foam on the surface – 1080 original gravity – good strong stuff!  I used a new stainless steel funnel (with strainer inside, I think it’s for jam making) to help me transfer the wort from the boiler tap to my clear fermenter – allowing the beer to drop a good distance to help get as much oxygen into it at this stage as possible.  The only problem is it gets so much oxygen, it foams right up – so I have to keep mopping up during the transfer.  Half way through I add in the yeast, just pouring all 1.5 litres of yeast/wort starter in.  Then top up with the last of the wort, some 19-20 litres.  I capped it off with a blow off tube (some tubing which is fed into a container of water – in case the fermentation foams up so much it would blow through a normal airlock causing possible contamination.

All in fermenter, my stout in barrel to the side

Because it’s in a clear fermenter, I can see the yeast getting to work – and within 12 hours it’s really going mad!  84 hours later it’s calming a little, but still bubbling strongly.  I’d expect it to stop the main fermentation soon – 3-4 days later (as my yeast is so strong after using a starter).  I’ll probably bottle after 2 weeks – but if it’s clear sooner than that I’ll change my mind.

Yeast going mad - it's like a snowstorm

New brew – “Krispy Stout”

I’ve been busy and have brewed up another beer – Krispy Stout this time, and it’s in the fermenter bubbling away as we speak.

You can click on the image below to see the recipe – ignore the bitterness figure though – it seems not to be working correctly!  I used both pale chololate malt and roasted barley to get the flavours and colour of a stout – using a bit of spare crystal malt just to add to the layers of flavour.

My Krispy Stout recipe

I used a whyest liquid yeast this time – a ‘proper’ Irish ale yeast to try and get the beer as close to type as possible.  Unusually for me I’ve kept to ‘normal’ beer strength, rather than try and hit the more old school 8-9%’s of some of my IPA style beers.  I also added a couple of large spoons of black treacle, just to add a touch of ‘toffee’ to the mix – the wort pre yeast tasted really nice; big flavours of coffee, chocolate and malt.

I made sure the liquid yeast would do the job by adding it to a wort starter 3 days before I needed it – by boiling up 2 litres of water with 200g of dried pale malt extract for 10 mins, then letting it cool in a steralised glass jar, and adding the liquid yeast.  Cover with a foil ‘lid’, and leave in a warm n dark place.  3 days later the yeast is going mad, like it’s fermenting a beer (which it is in reality, just a small batch).  Then pour that 2 litres of starter into the cooled wort in the fermentor, and stand back

Update 11th October 2009
Well I’ve barrelled the Stout, as I decided because Stout doesn’t need to be to fizzy, or cold, that a barrel would be the better option for it (pressure barrels cannot actually handle the pressure needed for highly carbonated drinks).  So I mixed up about 120 grams of dry light malt extract, and about 30 grams of brewing sugar, with about 2/3rds of a pint of boiling water.  That was added to the freshly steralised barrel, and then the stout siphoned out carefully into it, mixing with the sugars.

One little tip – I put the lid on the barrel (not screwed on!) then use my soda stream CO2 (with brass adaptor) in the lid inlet to fire some CO2 as a blanket over the beer, before screwing the lid on properly.  That way I know I’ve pushed some of the oyxgen out, putting a carbon dioxide ‘cap’ onto the beer to help protect it from oxydising (not good at this point).  Then I’ve used the heat belt (you plug it into the mains, and it warms up to keep the ale warm) to keep the temp up for the first week (not leaving it on all that time, as I’d end up with hot soup) – just now and then when it felt a little cool.  So hopefully the yeast which is left in the beer will eat up the sugars and the gas will stay in the beer to carbonate it.  After a day I used the soda stream gas again in anger, to try and raise the pressure up in the barrel so to help keep the naturally fermented CO2 in the beer.

I did try the beer during the transfer (pop a bit in a clean glass) – it was very flat (more so than I’ve noticed before..) but did taste spot on – probably the best or most authentic flavour I’ve managed so far.  Let’s hope the barrel fermentation works well and I’ve not just ended up with sweet flat stout!  I’ll give it another two weeks before I tap a trial glass…