Recently I was visited by my good friend Denny and one day we got together to brew a beer. Based on his recent experience with Gulden Draak, Denny wanted to brew a Belgian Dark Strong Ale. I have never brewed a Belgian style beer so I consulted one of my favorite brewing books, Brewing Classic Styles. The recipe we used is very close to what is provided in the book so out of respect for the authors and as part of my belief that this is a must own book I won’t be providing the recipe in this post.
The day began with the ritual I demand of all new initiates that brew on my system: hand cranking the mill. Due to the large amount of grain in this recipe I showed mercy and offered that we skip straight to using the drill to turn the mill, but Denny rose to the challenge in an effort to get ‘the full experience.’ After a couple false starts with the handle not gripping the crank shaft, Denny started powering through almost half of the 17.5 pounds of grain we were using for the beer.
Denny Stirring the Mash
While Denny was toiling with the mill, I prepared the water for the mash. I poured the grain into the mash tun while Denny stirred the mash to breakup any dough balls. Initially we had some false alarms because some grain had clogged the sight glass causing it to show a lower volume than expected. About 20 minutes into the mash the pumps that recirculate the mash and the hot liquor tank overheated and stopped working. Denny had the idea of hooking up a fan to keep the fans cooled. Both pumps finally started working again with about three minutes left in the mash.
We started sparging the mash and calibrated the refractometer. When we finished sparging and took a pre-boil gravity reading we found the biggest issue with the brew day so far: the gravity was way too low. There was light cursing and we took a couple more readings trying to convince ourselves that the first one was wrong. It wasn’t. The boil kettle element was turned off and the kettle was covered. We jumped in the car and went to the local homebrew shop to pick up some dry malt extract to increase the gravity where we needed it.
We returned to the garage following a brief pit stop for lunch. We were ready to continue the brew day. A final pre-boil measurement was taken to confirm the amount of extract we needed to add to the wort. We used amber malt extract which should not significantly alter the flavor of the beer. The rest of our ninety minute boil went well. Only having one hop addition allowed us to recoup after a hectic morning.
Near the end of the boil we sanitized the chiller and hooked the water hoses up. The fermenter was sanitized and waiting for the cooled wort. The start of the chilling process was smooth. When the fermenter had about 3 gallons of wort in it everything changed. Suddenly the wort would not drain out of the kettle fast enough to keep up with the pump. Thus began our dance of lifting and dropping hoses and trying to force gravity and the pumps to help us out. In the end we only ended up with a little over 4 gallons in the fermenter before we gave up fighting the hoses.
The ground water we were chilling with was rather warm due to the hot weather we’ve had recently. We couldn’t pitch so we stuck the fermenter in the fermentation fridge and went to have a beer while it cooled down. After a couple hours we went to check the beer and it was still too warm to pitch the yeast, but we took a sample to record our original gravity. The gravity was slightly high, but the unfermented sample tasted good. You could already pick out the different malt layers. Denny got the full experience of homebrewing that day. We fought through quite a few issues, and in the end we were rewarded with some good tasting wort.