Divination – Belgian Quad

 

This is my attempt at a Belgian Quad.  I wanted to try and make the beer how the monks would have made it.  They didn’t have tons of caramel and base malts to work with.  They got all of the color and flavor from different Candi sugars that they created onsite. For this recipe I used a very basic grain bill and homemade Candi sugar.  I cultured yeast from a Chimay Dubbel bottle a month before brewing.  I then did a month’s worth of step ups to the starter to get enough yeast to pitch into a beer that is close to 11.5% in alcohol.  The beer seemed to take a month to ferment out.  It was stable for weeks so I

put it in a Corny keg to bulk age at 60*, the ambient temperature of my basement.  The reason I said the beer seemed to ferment out before kegging … I released the pressure after 9 months to open the lid.  Once the lid was removed I had a foam geyser and lost 1/2 a gallon of beer.  Luckily with all the outward pressure didn’t allow anything in to infect the beer.  I re-lidded the beer and spent another month slowly degassing the beer so I’d be able to bottle it and have a general idea about the amount of CO2 I’d end up with.

The beer tastes great and I have been thinking about entering it into some Belgian beer competitions coming up.

Malt Bill
Pounds	Type
7	Pilsner
7	Belgian 2 row
1	Sugar – 60 minutes
1	Amber Sugar – 30 minutes
1	Dark Sugar – 15 minutes
Hops
IBU	Type	Time
20	Northern Brewer	60
3.5	Saaz	30
3	Styrian Golding	30
Mash Schedule
Temp	Time
147F	90 minutes
170F	Batch Sparge
170F	Batch Sparge
Yeast	Chimay Bottle Culture
Stats
5.5 gal	80% efficiency	IBU: 26-27