In addition to the cider we just made, we also finally bottled (and kegged) our quad. Just in time for Christmas! Redbeard had made an additional mini-batch by adding some Bruxellensis to a gallon of our quad (Prometheus #11). So, we bottled that, and a few more bottles of the regular quad, and kegged the rest.
Now just waiting for it to be get bubbly enough to drink…
Merry Christmas, everyone!
It was about a year ago that our first belgian brew was suffering from a stuck fermentation. And now here we are again with a quad that’s made a lot of progress towards the final gravity target, but still has a little bit left to go and hasn’t made any progress in the last week. So we’re trying the same trick again, and have moved the carboy (and growler for the Bruxellensis version) to the warmest room in our house (our home office) to try to get fermentation unstuck.
With any luck, this will get the fermentation completed and the results will turn out as good as that dubbel.
We pulled the quad to secondary fermentation, and had enough that it wouldn’t all fit in the carboy we typically use. So I put the extra gallon in the ex-blowoff growler and threw in some old Brett. Bruxellensis yeast, just for kicks. The color is not quite as dark as a typical quad, but it’s perfect for a high-gravity sour.
The quad is fermenting away nicely, and I was just thinking how smoothly everything’s going. The brew went well and we hit our gravity right on the mark. In fact, it went a little too well and we wound up with a little more than 5 gallons, but we figured there was enough head space in the fermenter, so why not keep it?
Now fermentation has started, and is going perhaps a bit too briskly — foaming up out the airlock and gumming it up. I just cleaned out the airlock and two minutes later it was all gunky again. So I rigged up a blow off tube. Luckily, our normal tubing we use for siphoning is the same gauge as our airlock stem, so I just plugged it into the airlock hole and put the other end in a half-full gallon growler. It’s bubbling very musically every minute or so.
Well, we haven’t gotten around to blogging about the tripel because, well, we were too busy drinking it. Because of the trouble in the brew, we weren’t quite sure what to expect. But it turned out to be very nice, probably my favorite tripel.
It’s not quite as strong as a tripel should be, stalling out around 8.5% instead of the 9.5% we were aiming for. But it’s nice and creamy, with a rich mouthfeel as a result of all the extra unfermented sugar. So in many ways it’s a bit more like a dubbel. So we’ve taken to calling it “Dubbel Axel”, since it’s more like 2.5x instead of 3x.
In any event, flush with quasi-success, we decided to brew a quad. Well, I should say we were planning on brewing a stout, but even after trying a dozen or so of them, couldn’t agree on what we liked. So we gave up on the stout idea and just made a Westy 12 clone. Most of the recipes you see online have a ton of specialty malts that I know St. Sixtus doesn’t use. So instead we went with a very elemental recipe: 16 lbs. of Pilsner malt, 3 lbs. of candi sugar syrup, Styrian Goldings and Hallertau hops, and White Labs 350 yeast. Instead of paying a ton for the candi sugar syrup, I found a recipe online and it worked out pretty well. It took longer than I expected to boil off the water and get the temperature up high enough to convert glucose to fructose. But once that happened, it worked like a charm.
Unlike last time, things went off without a hitch. The only small problem was that we had two old thermometers and they couldn’t bring themselves to agree on anything (even boiling water and ice water had 20°+ differences). So we picked up a new candy thermometer. Since we were also making candy, it worked out very nicely.