This post is about how we made the Belgian beer that so nearly won the Belgian category at Beeroff#3. Infact, it was so good that I’m goint to re-enter the same beer for the next competition, give it a new name and hope that 4 months longer in the bottle has perfected it. I say “we” rather than “me” because though normally I brew solo, this time I had some help. My friends from the US who were staying in London came over to help and to see how it’s done. I’m no brewing guru, but I have made some drinkable beer, and my friends live in a dry county in Arkansas. In my opinion learning to brew their own is going to be essential skill!
This was only my second ever attempt at making a proper Belgian beer, and my first strong Belgian. The recipe was adapted from Randy Mosher’s Radical Brewing’s “Three Nipple Triple” (see the end of the post for full details). I adapted the recipe around the ingredients I had left in the store cupboard, trying to channel Randy’s advice, be a radical brewer and trying not to worry about forgetting to buy a bitter orange for flavouring and improvising using the satsuma’s my children had ignored.
Here my friends are helping to measure out the grains below on my not very sensitive kitchen scales. For grains this doesn’t worry me too much.
Mashing
I use a 40L picnic cooler mash tun. I’d like to claim that I converted it myself, but I didn’t. I bought one pre-converted which is probably for the best as I’m not a very talented engineer. The strike water retained much more heat that expected when we added it keeping the temp at 70C, so we quickly added a few litres of cold water (i’m not sure how many - this was a bit of a panic) which brought the temp down to the mid 60s.
The picture shows us taking the strike water from the boiler into the mash tun and trying to evenly add the grain.
After 90 mins of mashing (where we sat down and drank tea). We sparged using my kettle. I own a sparge arm that fits into the top of my cooler box but I cannot get it to work despite repeated tries. I’ve found that it’s just as easy to use a temperature controlled kettle. Simply fill the kettle (1.5L) and set to 80C, and then sprinkle the hot water over. I keep a small tally chart to remind myself how many times we’ve done this so I don’t lose track. We added 9L in total which ends up being enough boils to get lost.
Boil
The boil for this style of beer is really simple compared with an IPA or a highly hopped beer. In a 90 minute boil we added a bag of hops at the start, had some more tea and chat. Then 75 mins later we added a the second batch of hops, and with 2mins to go the peel and spices. Hops are not a major feature of this beer, and essentially I used up some noble hops I had in taking up space in the freezer.
Primary Ferment
I let the beer cool down slowly. We have a tiled floor that stays cold even in summer (this was the end of August in London) and cools a beer down slowly in about 12 hours. Although there are lots of warning of infection whilst beer is cooling I’ve been ok with small batches so far doing this, and I worry more about driving off hop aroma.
I added the yeast at about midnight that night. I used a liquid yeast smack pack that I’d prepped the day before - Wyeast Belgian Abbey. I think it’s worth using liquid yeasts, the final beer is always much better.
The ferment itself was vigorous after a slow start - one of the less weird ferments as well, just looks like normal bubbles, and to the seasoned brewer like an exciting bubbling mass.
Secondary Ferment
A feature of many Belgian beers is the addition of sugar. Some recipes ask you to do this during the boil, but I wanted to try adding the sugar after racking off from the primary. To do this I boiled a couple of litres of water, mixed this in with the candy and demerara sugar and left to cool. This should have left the sugar solution in a sanitised condition, plus when adding to the secondary there would already be a high alcohol content which ought to restrict any unwanted micro-bacterial infection. No problems this time.
Tasting
I made this beer in August 2014, and I’m writing in December 2014, so there’s been a decent amount of time for the flavour to settle even for a strong beer. For my first attempt at a Belgian I am really pleased, especially as the longer i leave it the better is had got. Also this has had the best feedback of any of the beers that I have passed on to friends. If i was being critical, I think it sits somewhere between a duppel and a trippel without really being either. But for judging terms I’m calling it a trippel and entering it into the national home brewing awards Unfortunately tripels are in the same categories as IPAs (which in itself is bizarre) so I don’t expect to pull up any trees but it may just be the best thing I ever brewed so got to get it judged!
The name
Atomium - I've named the beer after the big expo sculpture in Brussels, if only to avoid anything to do with the mannekin pis
The recipie
Grain bill
3kg Munich malt
1.5kg pilsner malt
1kg pale malt
0.3kg biscuit malt
Additions (End of boil - 2mins)
Pith of 2 satsumas
2 very crushed cardamon pods
Hop bill
60g Golding's @ 90mins
50g Saaz @ 15mins
Gravity measurements
OG 1050 (added 500g of Candy sugar, 350g cane sugar to secondary)
FG 1008
Batch size
25L actual batch size (20L expected using software) EDIT - 17 March 2015
I entered this beer into two competitions, one formal and one informal. It got terrible reviews at the formal contest (the National Homebrew Awards) scoring 27/100 and described as "hard to drink" and "chlorophenolonic." I was pretty dissapointed, because this beer had been so good earlier and so many people had liked it. Then I entered it into our friend's blind taste testing, and it really sucked there too! What had changed? well the yeast flavours had backed off, and the tangerine and clove flavours had really come forward. Also the beer tastes thinner than before too. So altogether really dissapointing. Im not sure why its done this, maybe its the yeast, or maybe its because i didn't really push the ABV for the style, so it didn't have enough alcohol or malt to sustain it as it aged.
