Quadrupel Threat - Update (15.8%!!!)

So, good news. I stopped (cold crashed) fermentation on this monster at 1.015 which puts this beer roughly at 15.8% ABV. The scary thing is that I did have to stop the fermentation. The WLP099 was still eating. I was concerned that if I just let it finish naturally, it would be at risk of taking it all the way down to 1.000 (which I found with some research, has happened). The hydrometer sample I took tasted really good. It does obviously need to age for awhile but the fruit and candy flavors I was looking for are definitely prominent.

Originally I was going to be kegging this beer after a long secondary. But due to the situation with the WLP099 needing to be stopped and my worrying that even after a cold crash there would still be plenty of yeast to get active again in secondary, I opted to bottle. I now am confident this is a better option, because I now have the ability to age bottles of this beer for a very long time, which is exciting to me.

Now, this is no normal beer, so it will not be getting my normal bottling treatment. I took my time to make sure that the overall presentation is nice. I designed what I think is a pretty cool label (applied with milk). While it would be awesome to use Belgian corked bottles for this beer. That would be a pretty expensive endeavor. Maybe on a future version of this beer.

I am aiming for about 2.5 vol of CO2. A little higher than I would normally go, but not so much that it will cover the fruity esters. This means about 4.5oz of sugar for my priming solution. Seeing that I based a lot of this recipe on Westvleteren 12, which is a bit hazy, I figure the cold crash is enough to drop most of the yeast but keep the body character that I want. So no gelatin finings on this one. Also, while there still may be enough WLP099 to carb the bottles, I still added a half packet of EC-1118 (champagne yeast) to the bottling bucket just in case the WLP099 was close to done due to the toxic alcohol environment. I would usually add the whole packet, but I do not want exploding bottles so I only added half of the packet.

So, I will be letting this sit for about a month before popping one of them just to check for carbonation. If everything looks good, I will try my hardest to leave it alone until December. We'll see :)

Sex & Candy - My Christmas Imperial Brown Ale, Aged on Mezcal

This is just a fun one for me. It's about that time of the year to get the winter brews going and I've decided on doing an Imperial Brown Ale. However, I want to make it as interesting as possible. Here's my recipe:

Spec:
Est OG: 1.089
Est FG: 1.018
Est ABV: 9.5% + 1.6% (from Mezcal) = 11.1%
Est IBU: 48.4
Est SRM: 29.1

Steep 30 Mins:
4oz Crystal 80L
4oz Pale Chocolate
8oz Victory Malt

Hops:
60 Mins - 1oz Northern Brewer (8.5% AA)
15 Mins - .75oz Hallertauer (4.5% AA)
5 Mins - N1/69 Experimental (13.2% AA)

Fermentables:
60 Mins - 3lbs Pilsen Light LME
15 Mins - 7lbs Pilsen Light LME
15 Mins - 1lbs Corn Sugar
15 Mins - 1lbs Homemade Smoked Candi Sugar

Yeast:
WLP007 Dry English Ale

Fermentation:
3-4 Week Primary
Bottle age to December

Additions:
7 Days - .75oz Medium French Oak w/ 750ml (whole handle) El Silencio Mezcal

There are a lot of interesting choices in here for me. The grains I chose are simple, normal brown ale specialty grains. Where it starts to get different is with the N1/69 South African Experimental hop. I had purchased a South African hop sampler box from Northernbrewer.com primarily for an IPA I wanted to do, but the tropical aromatic character of this hop I feel will contrast with the smokiness of the candi sugar and mezcal very well, further adding to my whole Sex & Candy theme.

In regards to the late additions, I have had great success with these at this point and I plan on continuing this process as long as I'm doing anything with extract. Yes, I did in fact make my own Candi sugar that I consider an epic fail for a Belgian. However it has this wonderful smokey fruit flavor to it that I think will really work in this brew.

I'm using WLP007 because I only want a small amount of the classic English fruit esters, but not enough that it becomes overwhelming with the smokey flavor. Also, since this is a higher gravity beer, the higher attenuation is useful.

My favorite part of this brew however has to be the Mezcal. I had a Mezcal/Tequila barrel aged Imperial Brown Ale from Figueroa Mountain about a year ago and it was so good that I have been wanting to make something similar for some time now. The crisp smokiness is so unique. And yes I am using A LOT of it. But screw it, it's Christmas. We can use the warm up. By my calculations, there will be .46 shots in each 12oz beer. Yummy. Also, some oak.

I will be making the starter for this beer Wednesday night this week and brewing it on Friday. Unfortunately, this one is going to sit for a long time, but it will be worth it.

Quadrupel Threat - Fermentation

I brewed this beer almost 4 weeks ago (05/25/17). It is still fermenting. This is the longest fermentation I have ever had.

I pitched the wort onto the yeast cake at 64℉ and let it sit there for 3 days. These were the most explosive 3 days of fermentation I have experienced. I had a blow off tube in there from the get go, but it overflowed my starsan mug within half a day. I cleaned that mess up and put the mug inside of a sauce pan to catch the overflow. This had to be emptied about three times.

Once the fermentation started to calm down, I pitched the WLP099 starter and raised it a degree to 65℉. This caused some more explosiveness for a couple of days.

Once it calmed down again, I started raising it a degree every 2 days until I hit 69℉. After about a week there, I turned up the temp controller to 72℉ and it's been sitting there ever since.

I am finding that WLP099 is a very slow and steady yeast near it's end. The airlock has been bubbling every 5-6 seconds for about 16 days. I have been checking the SG about weekly, last time being this previous Wednesday (06/14/17), where it was at 1.030 (13.8% ABV). Getting Close!

I do have to say that this process has pretty much sold me on the Olive Oil trick. It is obviously working just fine. We'll see how the final product is with head retention and what not, but attenuation is fine so far!

I plan to check it again this Wednesday. WLP099 is also known for over attenuation, which I absolutely do not want. So hopefully, Quadrupel Threat will be <1.020 by Wednesday. If so, I am going to cold crash it for a couple days and transfer it to secondary to batch age. Plus, at this point, that yeast cake is almost 6 weeks old. I've heard of people going longer, but I don't want to push it and get weird flavors.

On a positive note, the Dubbel I made for the yeast cake is on tap and delicious!
I've named it Dubbel Time. 6.5% ABV.

Quadrupel Threat - A Very Large Belgian Quad

So, I was wanting to make a very big beer just to play with what it takes to successfully attenuate and create actual good flavor with high gravity/abv. After doing some research, I decided to go in the route of a Belgian Quad / Dark Strong Ale. This is mostly due to the capabilities of WLP530 (Abbey Ale) yeast. It has a high alcohol tolerance as well as being well known for not stopping mid fermentation. I also just really like belgians and it's summer so the math added up.

For the recipe, I did some research on what specialty grains and hops are used for certain clones, such as Westy 12, and then adjusting the amounts via ratio of clone abv vs goal abv. After building myself a bunch of options, I ended up going with the following:

Steeping grains:
6oz Special B
12oz Caramunich

Hops:
60min - 1 oz Nugget (13% AA)
30min - 1.5oz Hallertauer (4.8% AA)
15min - 1.5oz Styrian Goldings (5.4% AA)

60min:
4lbs MoreBeer UltraLight LME

15min:
12lbs MoreBeer UltraLight LME
2lbs D-180 Belgian Candi Syrup
1lbs D-45 Belgian Candi Syrup
1lbs Corn Sugar

On paper, this would get me an OG of roughly 1.133. Belgians are notorious for having a high percentage of pure sugar, so I went with 20% total mixture of candi and corn sugar. I chose MoreBeer's UltraLight because of it's higher than average fermentability (80% +/- 5%). So in a perfect world, this would let me attenuate down to 1.015. All of these decisions are in the name of attenuation, as well as aiming for as traditional of an end product as possible.

I suppose I should also explain my reasoning for the extreme amount of late addition. I am a firm believer that the length of a boil for extract brewing is only important for the AA extraction of hops. LME/DME was already wort at one point, so you only need to get it dissolved into the water. This reduces the amount of sugar that is caramalized during the boil which in turn means more fermentable sugar and lighter color. However, you do need a small amount at the beginning of the boil to help the hops (i aim for ~20%). More on this HERE.

Now, the most important part of this whole experiment is the yeast. I did mention WLP530 earlier, which I am using. However, to get enough of a yeast starter for this beer is incredibly difficult. Even a 1 gallon starter is not necessarily enough to give it a proper pitch. I decided that my best option was to make a 5 gallon batch of a simple ~1.060 OG Dubbel and pitching on it's yeast cake. In theory, this would give me about 1 trillion yeast cells. Yes this is over pitching a bit, but I am not taking any risks. I want attenuation. This also gives me a beer to drink while waiting on the Quad. :)

On top of pitching onto the WLP530 yeast cake, I pitched a small 1.5L starter of WLP099 (High Gravity Yeast) after about 3 days of fermentation. This allows the WLP530 to create most of the yummy Belgian flavors and lets the WLP099 do the cleanup work and make sure that my goal FG of <1.020 is reached. Also to note, WLP099 creates some belgiany type flavors itself in the right conditions.

Most everyone will tell you that you need an insane amount of oxygenation to make the yeast happy on a brew such as this. I do not have an oxygen tank and I do not plan on buying one either. My reasoning for this is the incredible power of olive oil. I opted for a small toothpick dipped in olive oil with the remaining drippings flicked off, and then thrown into the boil. This is a very controversial subject that is still not considered as good as oxygen, but I'm doing it anyways because $$$. You can read more about the science HERE.

Welcome to my blog!

As you can tell by the header, my name is Ethan. I live in San Luis Obispo County, CA. I like to consider it the capital of craft beer in California. We have a lot of breweries here: Firestone Walker (my primary inspiration), Figueroa Mountain, Central Coast Brewing, Barrel House and many more. On top of that, we have been ranked as the drunkest area in California, ha.

In this blog I will be discussing some of my more experimental homebrews, from design to final review. As well I will be giving updates on what I have on tap, ready in bottle and/or in the works.

I am currently only working with extract due to my living situation not allowing enough room to store all grain hardware. I have found that with some process tweaking and attention to detail, you can still make incredible beer with extract.