brew dog blog » belgian

Brew Logs (Breuckelen Red)

mrb — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 01:55:02 +0000

Getting into beer and homebrewing has allowed me to meet some pretty interesting people — homebrewers in particular are relatively strange folk for the most part. Dedicated to their craft, they embody a lot of the principles and attitudes I admire in people in general, and I’ve seen evidence of excellent homebrewers who are also excellent welders, chefs, entrepeneurs, designers, gardeners, and…chemists.

An association with a certain chemist has allowed me to trade beers for yeast and bacterial cultures — that’s right, I trade beer for the goods to make beer, isolated in the basement of a DIY lab in suburban New Jersey. Recently my connection put together a blend of yeasts and bacterias meant to emulate the Rodenbach brewery’s culture that produces their distinctive Flemish Red style of beer, and I decided I had to get my shit together and brew in that style right away.

Having recently acquired a bottle of Lost Abbey Red Poppy, also within the style, I decided it was fate — I always try to drink a beer in the style I’m brewing on brew day. I grabbed some specialty grains, hit up the “local” home brew shop for flaked maize and oak chips, and made it happen. I brewed completely outside for the first time as well, which was awesome. I stacked some milk crates, ran the hose outside, and went for it. I’m glad I did, as it forced me to hang out outside all day in the yard, and it was a very peaceful and fun experience. Brew Day is getting shorter and shorter, and I now have the whole process pretty much totally memorized. I’ll post the recipes and some pictures here, and will also post a review of the (3*IPA)/2 which has been drinking really nicely the past couple of days.

The beer is named after the original, Dutch name for Brooklyn. I designed the recipe to include some of the base malt I have left over, and added a complex array of high quality crystal malts to compliment everything. Flaked Maize is a traditional ingredient.

Recipe:

5# Maris Otter

6.5# Vienna

3# Crystal Malt Mix (some English, Belgian, and American, mix of high and low, some red for flavor)

1# Flaked Maize

Hopped to 20 or 25 IBUs with some pretty old Northern Brewer pellets.

Mashed for 75 minutes at 153 or so, boiled for 75 minutes. Chilled down and pitched the yeast vials at 70 degrees. Vigorous fermentation around 36 hours later, it’s really kicking. The OG came in around 1.090.

After primary, I will rack to a corny keg and drop in some medium toast oak chips, and let it sit for about a year.

Brew Logs from a Long Lost Dog (Of Belgian IPA Failure and Kombucha Redemption)

t-bone — Sun, 10 May 2009 01:16:22 +0000

I’ve been a long time gone from the blog but with this inaugural springtime post I hope to hop back on the wagon. We jammed a gig last night and I brought some of my first beer of spring, a Belgian IPA, which has been bumming me out as it seems to have “picked up a little something” somewhere in the brewing process. Its a down-the-drain batch, basically, which would be less of a disappointment if I hadn’t bottled a sixer-and-a-half of it with a little something special, the first experiment in which I hope to be a long love affair with brewing extra special mood altering beers.

Mashing of the Belgian IPA

It seems that Mother Nature has taken pity upon me for my beer failings, however, as today I bottled my first batches of home-brewed Kombucha, and they turned out better than I could have hoped for. I’ve been wanting to get into brewing Kombucha Tea (or KT, as the hippies call it) for a while and never managed to hook up a SCOBY (Symbiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeast!) from a friend who brews. As luck would have it, two weekends ago we were walking through Park Slope on our way to Beer Table to pick up some flip-top 33cl bottles for my homebrew from Justin, when we happened upon a table of generous yuppie-hippies giving away SCOBYs from a big jar.

Beautiful, beautiful booch...

Arriving home with my SCOBYs I immediately got to work on two batches, a regular Black Tea and Sugar Kombucha, and one I’ve been wanting to try since I first got hooked on both Kombucha and Yerba Mate, a Mint Mate Kombucha with Honey. I was wary of the Mate and Honey as I wasn’t sure they’d have enough nutrients to feed the SCOBY and ferment properly, but both batches got down to about 3.1pH after two weeks, so i sampled some of each today and they were great! The Black Tea KT I would even say was too sweet compared to the Mate, so for batch 2 I dropped the sugar down about 30%. The recipe is basically 1/4c tea and 1/4c sugar for each quart of water, but i’m working closer to 1/8c of sugar now to see how it turns out. I bottled all 3 quarts and put them back in the pantry to carbonate so I’ll post an update later on.

Homebrew Review (Belgian Pale)

mrb — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 03:54:23 +0000

At the end of August I brewed a “Belgian Pale Ale,” which I called a “Sour IPA” at the time because I didn’t have anything else to call it. Since then, I’ve tried most of the easily obtainable examples of commercial beers which pair Belgian Yeast with big doses of American or Noble hops, and I’ve been surprised in both ways — sometimes very pleased, sometimes disappointed. Although this beer didn’t turn out sour in the slightest, there’s a great amount of leathery, deep Brett character on the nose, mixed with more typical Belgian yeast esters. Taking a cue from Mike at The Mad Fermentationist Blog, I decided to post a review of some of my homebrews, so that I can have a public record, and try to step outside myself a bit to give it some honest critique. Overall, I’m pretty pleased with this beer, especially as it was my second homebrew. It pours a beautiful golden color, with a huge, fluffy white head that leaves plenty of lacing. A lot of great aromas from the melange of yeasts I employed, with the slightest hint of dry malt character as well. The flacor is pure hop bitterness up front, which finishes bone dry, leaving a bit to be desired on the mid-palette. I’d like a bit more assertive malt character for the next time around, but in terms of a relatively sessionable 7.5% ABV beer, it’s pretty tasty. I learned a lot making this beer, and I still have a lot left. Anyone wanna come over and help me finish it?

Drinking Christmas (De Struise Tsjeeses, Fantome Noel, Nøgne Ø Peculiar Yule)

mrb — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 03:08:27 +0000

Drinking Holiday Beer with Mr. Beer Santa

Winter Beers aren’t really my favorite category — Winter Warmers, Christmas Beers, whatever you call them, they can be overspiced, cloying, and just plain weird when you get the wrong combination of ingredients together. Unfortunately for me, my birthday falls in the heart of Christmas Beer season, and since birthdays are the time when you get together and make people buy you beers, I usually end up drinking a lot of them. Fortunately for me, my friends are mostly beer geeks, and I spent my birthday at Spuyten Duyvil, not some shithole bar with no choices, so all of the christmas beers I drank that night were awesome.

The Sturdy Brewers from De Struise went for it with their Winter Beer and called it “Jesus.” Sure, it’s actually Tsjeeses and is in Dutch, and has another meaning, but for me, it’s Jesus beer. Like the other beers I’ve tried from De Struise, J-word presents an extremely complex package of flavor and aroma. It pours a cloudy, thick yellowish/amber color, and smells positively heavenly as soon as you bring it to your grill. I smelled oxidized sherry flavors, white wine and grapes, spicy, and sweetness. Tasting it was a similar experience, with the characteristic malty Struise flavor, mixed in with ground spices and intense malt sweetness. A bit of bitterness keeps this balanced for the most part, but it’s intense. Worthy of the name for sure, and a hell of a way to keep warm in frozen NYC.

Fantome’s “Noel” beer is one of the few I haven’t had the chance to try that I know about, and I’m pretty sure I drank a fresh bottle, though I’m not sure. It had a smoky, black appearance, and a smoky black taste. A Dark Saison is a rare treat, and since Saisons are all that Fantome brews, that’s what we have. Brewer and artisan Prignon likes to tuck special ingredients into his seasonal brews, and with this once I got lots of dry malt sweetness, the classic Fantome barnyard action, and a big hit of smokey chocolate. Nice. A Stout by way of Belgian Farmhouse un-Orthodoxy? Another wonderful Fantome creation and a great experience — a really wonderful bottle.

The Norweigan brewery Nøgne Ø’s Peculiar Yule rounded out the trio of Darkness that I entered into on my birthday night, and it definitely packed a hell of a wallop. The first, second, and last thing you notice about this beer is the crazy amount of ginger on the nose and on the pallette. Inbetween there is a rainbow of dark malt, deep fruit, and a nice hit of bitterness as well. Normally I wouldn’t be so craazy about such a spicy beer but this really hit the spot — it was dry enough, weird enough, and drinkable enough that I could really get into it.

Spuyten Duyvil did a public service by highlighting so many excellet Winter Beers (and giving me a great reason to take a year off from drinking them), and as usual I was rewarded for trying things I “wouldn’t normally” drink. I drank a lot of beer on my birthday night/weekend/week — more to come from the “first of 09″ selections.

Brew Logs (Belgian Dark Strong Ale)

mrb — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 22:09:11 +0000

Welcome back to Brew Logs, where I keep track of my experiments in homebrewing. Even though I brewed my third all-grain batch last Saturday, there were lot of firsts — first really high gravity ale (I was aiming for at least OG 1.1), first solo brew (none of the dudes could make it), and my first attempts at using my new outdoor burner. All in all, it was a great day. Brewing alone becomes less of a party or hangout and more of a meditation. I cleaned, organized, and executed my brew session with a good amount of precision, which made me feel good. Yes, I still enjoy cleaning and organizing. That means I’m either cut out for this, or I haven’t done it enough times for it to bother me.

The Dark Strong is an interesting style, and many people’s favorite beers, or the beers they vote “THE BEST IN THE WORLD” are Dark Strongs — they are also sometimes known as Trappist Style ales, usually of 12 degrees or higher by older naming conventions (click here for the BJCP guidelines on the Dark Strong). I’ve enjoyed a number of beers from this category immensely, and as I was looking for a beer to help me get through the cold Brooklyn winter, this seemed like a perfect choice.

I went with a simple recipe instead of the complex grain bills that have been winning the homebrew competitions in this style category. Since I wanted my beer to be somewhat monk-like, the inimitable Brew Like a Monk by Stan Hieronymus was invaluable. I decided on a 50% Pils and 50% Pale ale recipe for the grain, plus 3lbs of Belgian Dark Candi Syrup. With around 80% efficiency, this brought my OG up to 1.13, which really surprised me. My mash tun was very full, and the stirring was pretty difficult, but I’m a big believer in how efficient my fly-sparging procedure is, so that must have had quite a lot to do with it.

After around 18 hours, the beer was blowing off an insane amount of trub and gross black grease, which didn’t cease for about 4 days. The airlock is on in place of the blowoff tube now, and as of 5 days of fermentaiton, the SG was down to 1.06, which is right on target for 2 weeks bringing me down to 1.02 or so, according to my amazingly crude calculations. Temperature fluctuations in Brooklyn have been a bit rough, and even though the wort got down to about 62 in the carboy, fermentation hasn’t ceased, and the production of esthers from the White Labs Trappist Ale Yeast seems all but unaffected. I used a nice hop schedule which included Warrior, Northern Brewer, and Saaz pellets to bring me to around 50 or 60 IBUs as well, and with little hop aroma and the right amount of bitterness, this shoudl bring me about to where I want to be.

I’m not going to be spicing any of my Belgians on the first round, because I want to get the base recipes on lockdown. Then I’ll add spices and other flourishes as necessary or desired. In other homebrewing news, I have pruchased a small system for kegging with cornelius kegs, and I’ll post that info and experience along as it comes.

Life is Beautiful (Rochefort 10)

mrb — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:06:32 +0000

This bottle of goodness travelled all the way from southern Belgium, where it is brewed by one of the only Trappist Breweries in the world. Rochefort makes three Ales — the 6, the 8, and the 10. I recently purchased a 10 at New Beer in Manhattan and aside from having sampled a large number of high powered Trappist ales in Antwerp over the summer, this is the most intense and amazing beer I’ve ever had, period. This is one of the few brews that I have had which are deserving of the “Life is Beautiful” tag. Whenever there’s a beer that there’s not much more to say about other than “if you haven’t had this, you haven’t had beer,” I’ll just tag it like that to keep it simple. Rochefort 10 is full of amazing flavor like dried fruits and other dark and mysterious things. There’s a ton of alcohol at almost 11.5% ABV, and you can taste it. But it doesn’t matter, because you’re literally swimming in a full bodied, complex, ocean of a beer that is the very blueprint for hundreds of imitators. Seek Rochefort now and seek it often. Reviews of the 6 and 8 are forthcoming.

Belgian Wordplay, Fairies, and Christmas Beer in April? (Alvinne Balthazar Strong Ale)

mrb — Thu, 01 May 2008 02:39:45 +0000

The internet can teach you a lot these days. Like the fact that Picobrouwerij Alvinne, which roughly translates to “micro micro micro” brewery Alvinne, actually has a website (I think, at least, there’s a lot of information here – alvinne.be/ – if you can read Flemish), and that Wikipedia Entry (Picobrouwerij Alvinne) on said brewery is actually rather informative, even if you can only read English. After drinking one of the Alvinne beers, I had to know what they were all about.

The Balthazar is one of three Christmas Beers that is ostensibly Christmas-ey because it is spiced, strong, and syrupy — heavily but pleasantly malted and pretty intense with a bit of bitterness, and a good amount of heat from the booze. Complex. I really enjoyed it. It is an unbelievable color when you pour it all out, and the flavor is really something to behold. I’m staring at the label and trying to figure out what’s going on. I think this beer truly does speak a different language, but I’m tuning in, and loving it. I have to get my hands on some more of these Alivinne brews — I think they have a lot Belgian Gospel to lay on me.