When I've done strong brews in the past I've always been short of target SG, so this year I used a low 67% efficiency.
For the Belgian Candy sugar I took advice from Zgoda and made it this year with yeast-nutient rather than citric acid.
Taste isn't like toffee / burnt sugar, more like a mix of caramel & unrefined brown sugar.
Recipe is similar to one I listed in recipes section. Only mod was to reduce candy sugar by half and use plain white sugar for rest of sugar input.
Belgian Dark Strong - WLP545 - 23L - (HTML version here)
Date: 12-13/4/13
Gyle Number: 80
No Belgian or UK pale in stock so using base UK lager malt plus range
of more aromatic / dark malts plus some home-made candy sugar.
Flaked wheat & oats added for body & mouthfeel.
Fermentable Colour lb: oz Grams Location
Lager Malt, Flagon (Crisp) 2.5 EBC 11 lbs. 0.4 oz 5000 grams B1
Wheat Malt - Dingemans (bal) 3 EBC 2 lbs. 3.3 oz 1000 grams NonUK1
Belgian Candy Sugar (bal) 65 EBC 1 lbs 450 grams Kitchen
White Sugar 0 EBC 1 lbs 450 grams Kitchen
Munich Malt - UK (Bal) 20 EBC 1 lbs. 10.4 oz 750 grams UK1
Flaked Wheat 0 EBC 1 lbs. 1.6 oz 500 grams UK2
Caramunich Type 2 - Weyermann 120 EBC 0 lbs. 10.5 oz 300 grams NonUK1
Special B - Weyermann 300 EBC 0 lbs. 10.5 oz 300 grams NonUK1
Flaked Oats 0 EBC 0 lbs. 7.0 oz 200 grams Kitchen
Caramunich Type 3 - Weyermann 150 EBC 0 lbs. 3.5 oz 100 grams NonUK1
Hop Variety Type Alpha Time lb: oz grams Ratio
Tettnang Whole 5 % 90 mins 0 lbs. 1.8 oz 50 grams 55.1%
EKG (in hop bag) Pellets 5.1 % 90 mins 0 lbs. 1.4 oz 40 grams 44.9%
Final Volume: 23 Litres
Original Gravity: 1.084
Final Gravity: 1.013
Alcohol Content: 9.4% ABV
Total Liquor: 39.1 Litres
Mash Liquor: 40.8 Litres
Mash Efficiency: 67 %
Bitterness: 36.2 EBU
Colour: 76 EBC
Yeast:
WLP545
Yeast cake slurry (estimate) 500 cc
It turned out to be a marathon brewing weekend in the end. My fault as I never allow enough time for all the stuff I needed to do. As well as this brew I needed to Keg/bottle AG79 as I needed yeast cake and also keg / bottle AG78 a Saison as I needed the space in the fermenting fridge...
I mashed a bit stiff at 2.2:1 as I wanted a bit more sparge water.
Mash went fine. I ended up with 30.5L @ 1066.
Clearly still lots of sugars left in grain, so as an experiment I added 16L of treated water onto the grain with a plan to let it batch sparge overnight and see what SG was in the morning.
Boil went well and sugars added but I ran out of time ( volume too high / SG too low), and I was off to a local beer festival, so I left it to cool with a plan to continue on Sunday morning.
On (late) Sunday morning it took an hour or so to get to boiling temp again, after 20mins boil to hopefully sanitise volume OK so I added protofloc and chilled.
I ended up with 22.5L @ 1083 before AG79 yeast slurry added, bringing volume up to 23L
I checked 7 hours after pitching yeast and it had gone mad, already filling fermentation trap, so that was removed.
I reduced fridge temp from 20 to 18C and harvested/ removed about a litre of froth.
I checked this morning and its happy with about 4cm kreusen.
AG80B - Saison Lite
Back to Sunday afternoon. After pitching AG80, I checked mash tun wort I'd left over night and this was 1042 so being a cheapskate, I decided to use this to make a corny of a lowish alcohol brew with saison yeast cake from AG78 I was kegging.
I poured wort straight into boiler which still had remains from Belgian strong (hops & trub), bar EKG hopbag.
I did another batch sparge of 8L (1015) and then boil up with a plan to increase fermentables with about 10% sugar.
This was soon boiling
I added 360g white sugar, 30g mollases as a syrup (boiled 5 mins in microwave)
And 125g chopped mixed dried fruit. I thought peel might give another interesting flavour.
I ended up with ~18L of 1035 wort after adding Saison yeast slurry.
Taste was OK, so hopefully it will end up a drinkable session beer.
