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 :)