Home Brew Forum

This is the kwak recipe i'm brewing tonight.

Its mashing away, sparging at about 8.15pm, going to be a late night.

Kwak: Tawny amber Kwak sports a creamy off white head and starts off with a down to earth, mildy spicy, malt aroma, smooth rich, and full-bodied, it entices with a malty, slightly sweet, alcoholic taste on the palate finishing with a warm, dry aftertaste.
OG 1081-1086, FG 1015-1019, SRM 15, IBU 18-20, 8.5 % alcohol.

lager malt 6.25 Kg
Oat Husks 0.65 Kg (my lager malt is crushed to finely and sticks, hoping this sorts it out)
Munich malt 1.4 Kg
Special B malt 0.175 Kg

Mash at 65-66 C for 90 mins

In the Boil

90 mins
Light muscavado sugar 0.85 Kg
Challenger 5.6 % 20g

15 mins
10g of challenger
10g of stryian goldings

fermenting with yeast from a chimay red bottle grown up to 2L over the course of a week and a half.
Going to keep it relatively warm ie 20-23 C.

Hope you have a good brewing evening delboy

That sounds delicious, hope it's going well for you.

I did a mash last night and the boil tonight to try and fit in a brew.
My mash was a disaster - for some reason only made 1/2 the amount of liquor needed for the mash. Sorted that dumped in my grains and then notice that my stainless steel braid laying on the counter - somehow it had come undone.

Did manage to bottle some cider while mashing.

The wort is sitting patiently waiting to be boiled, hopped, whirlfloced, aerated and pitched.

Hopes yours goes better.

Sparging was a pain in the bum, no stuck sparge (good stuff those oat husks) but the shear volume of grains in the mash tun proved difficult.

Boil is on, although the elements seem to be flicking on and off (time to get the citric acid out to them i think).

Probably going to get finished about 1 am but sure its all good fun

Godd man DB, hope it's gone well

A tad disappointing, 1076 gravity for 5 gallons.
Not completley suprised since i stopped sparging around the 1035 mark, since it was such a PITA .

I might boil up some extract and feed it to the ferment in the next few days to get it up to the right sort of gravity, normally i'd let it go but since its a xmas beer i want every bit of that 8.5 % to blot out the pain

sounds like a fun night. Was going to brewmyself today but only have 2.5 kgs of pale left

good luck with it

Just looked in on the brew, nice rocky head forming on it already, the smell so far is slightly phenolic, im going to bump up the heating in the spare room to hopefully bring out the ester profile of this yeast.

just don't over do it, that yeast can produce alot of ester with out a lot of heat addation

oblivious wrote:just don't over do it, that yeast can produce alot of ester with out a lot of heat addation

Cheers OB, i'll stick a wee thermo in the room and keep an eye on it.

raising the temp a tad seems to have worked, gone are the phenolics replaced by glorious peachy esters

Just had a taster out of the fermenter smelt wonderful, nice peachy banana smell, the taste is something else, i was expecting banana but i got a mouthful of clove oil, really strong clove but in a good way.

I did a hefe weizen that i thought was on the clovely side after tasting the kwak brewed with chimay i have to revise that oponion and say that the hefe was just tasteless, now i know what a clovey beer is supposed to taste like

chimay yeast can give a large amount of different flavours, look in good