Belgian beers are insidious. Start with a recipe for a delcious beer of 5.5% abv, then add enough sugar to make it 7%. The result is the most drinkable 7% abv in the universe. The truth is that I'll probably never be impressed by Belgian beers as a style any more than I'm impressed by any other style. What really impresses from a brewer is the skill of making the same great beer over and over, not the skill of assembling good ingredients and knowing what you're doing with them to have, once finished, a good beer.

Here's the scheme for a belgian beer: take some pils malt and (if desired) add judicious amounts of crystal, aromatic and some darker base malts and (for the darker varieties) conservative amounts of chocolate malt to make a beer of gravity 10 to 20 less than your desired final gravity. Add sugars (light for light, dark for darker) to make up the gravity. Bitter gently, about 4 IBU for every 10 points of gravity. Ferment with belgian yeast. To ensure that the yeast doesn't go too wild, keep the fermentation around 70 the whole time.

That's it.

My suspicion is that making belgian beer really well at home is more difficult than making other styles because fermentation character is what the beer is all about and controling fermentation requires knowlege and aparatus that the homebrewer doesn't use for other beers. On the other hand, we probably should use such knowledge for brewing other beers, and the aparatus for controling it wouldn't be a bad addition. In an ideal world, I'd live in a place that had an average daily temperature below that of ale fermentation and I'd use that to my advantage in beer after beer.

I'm reading Brew Like a Monk, which is a nice read. A little on the dry side as the author writes without ardor, but a nice read.

Still, there's a claim in this book that I want a theoretical underpinning for: adding sugar makes beer dry. The book quotes a dude named Phil Markowski, author of Farmhouse Ales:

"...there is still a fairly prevalent anti-adjunct bias among many American brewers, both amerature and professional, that makes them hold back from using enough sugar to achieve the same level of dryness that the classic Belgian examples exhibit."

and the author insinuates or asserts much the same, that sugar promotes dryness, in several places.

I'll buy that for a beer of a given gravity, the use of sugar promotes a dry beer. I'm not buying that the use of sugar makes a beer drier than a beer from the same wort without the sugar would have been. Now, I'm not buying it, but I could be convinced, given a sampling of appropriate beers or a theoretical account. But I'm thinking it's really only the first assertion that's true. (And the theoretical justification is simple: sugars are more fermentable than wort, so wort of a given gravity attenuates better if it contains sugar, and hence has less residual sugar, than an all-malt beer.)

One distinct theoretical possibility is that sugar, by increasing gravity, alters fermentation characteristics that will enhance the perceived dryness of the beer. Increasing gravity does increase ester production, so, well, theres a possibility here. But I'm not yet sold.

Thursdays are brew days on my current schedule, and there's always a Thursday fast approaching. I'm deciding between two beers I might do, a straw-colored blond ale and an old ale that's meant for the holidays of 2007.

The blond will follow a pilsner like grain bill and be fermented with Cali V Ale yeast from white labs. I will probably stick to noble hops for bittering and target around 25 IBU, with no aroma and only mild flavor hop additions, probably also with noble hops. The grain bill be be 8-9lbs. pils malt and 1/4-1/2 pound each carapils and wheat malt, mashed around 151 degrees.

The old ale will be a parade of crystal malts. I'm going to use several varieties from the whole color spectrum, probably around 2 lbs. total, in a 12lbs recipe (O.G. around 15 Plato.) I will also use about an ounce of black patent for clarity and to help dry the finish. I'm thinking 45-50 IBU. Small amounts of finishing hops, which won't be very noticable after 10 months in the bottle. I'm considering making this beer all Target hops. Fermented with dry english ale yeast.

The consdieration for the old ale is that I should make it soon if I want to to have time to age and all that before Thanksgiving. I have two beers that await kegging right now, so there's no special need to ferment a session beer like the blond now. On the other hand, I'm anticipating the blond slightly more, perhaps ony because I like the name "Platinum Ale", perhaps because I would actually get to see what it was like before, say, the next time I hear a Christmas carol.

I just found a cool bit of advice here: a racking cane tip on the dip tube in a keg will reduce getting yeast from the keg.

Pacific ESB...

I got home to discover that this beer wants to come gushing out of the ferementer.

I wrapped the top in plastic wrap, which should allow air to escape without risking any exposions if it gets stuck.

I'm getting good at this. I like an early start on my brew day; today I mashed-in at 7:42am. I was done just six hours later. I'm getting good at this. If pro-mash is to be believed, I hit 80% efficiency today. 5.5 gallons of 1.0485 gravity wort with 8 lbs. maris otter, 1/4 pound wheat malt and a pound of crystal. I'm getting good at this.

I forgot the irish moss. I'm pretty good at this.

Here's a picture of the Pacific Ale:


Okay, that's more like a picture of the shirt I was wearing in 2005 when UNC won the national championship, but I promise there's beer underneath. The shirt needed to be retired, so I'm using it as a carboy jacket starting today.

Thursday's brew is a beer I'm calling Pacific ESB. It's styled after some pale ales I've had that come fromt the Pacific Northwest, like this. I'm going for fruity yeast, assertive bitterness but enough malt to say that it's balanced. I have an idea in my mind about this beer and I'm almost certain that I won't succeed in making it. Nonetheless,
8 pounds Maris Otter,
.25 pounds wheat malt,
.75 pounds of Cargil 20L crystal, and
.25 pounds of Cargil 40L crystal
mashed at 150 for 60 minutes.
.5 oz E.K.G. for 30 mintes,
.5 oz E.K.G. for 2 minutes, and
and enough chinook raise the bitterness the beer to 30 IBU, I'm guessing about .40 oz.
White Labs Pacific Ale Yeast, from a starter.

This could be the best IPA ever to come from Nextweek Brewery. It's wearing a shirt to keep it from gettting light struck. It will probably sit in that carboy for over a week. I had originally planned to dry hop it, but the aroma is so good right now, I'm not seeing the need.

It's still fermenting and it has attenuated 85% already--70.5% RDF! F.G. 1.009 or lower... 7.35% A.B.V. so far. That' bigger than I wanted. What the hell can you do?

I'm planning a Pacific Northwest styled bitter for Thursday brewing.

I'm getting near capacity in my brewery. The oatmeal stout is in a keg, the altbier could go into a keg at anytime (though I think I'll let it condition a bit longer), and I have an IPA to rack in a couple of days for about two weeks conditioning and dry hopping. Once I keg the altbier I will have over eight gallons in kegs, with an IPA waiting in the wings.

When my brewery gets close to capacity, I start to think in kinds of styles rather than styles of beer. Certain things can be fit into the brewery schedule while other things cannot, and some things are convenient in the schedule at that time, because you don't feel like you need to brew just to keep the kegs full. So that has me thinking in terms of kinds of styles. I want to make some strong ales that I bottle and hold a few months before drinking. I want to get some summer ales going for when the weather warms up. I want some standards for when my kegs get low.

The strong ales that interest me are a barley wine, a dubbel and the beer I'm calling my 2007 Christmas Old Ale. The last I plan to open around Thanksgiving. The barley wine I will hold for about a year. The dubbel will probably be the last one I brew and the first one I drink. For all three of these beers, there will be no priming sugar in the bottle. I'm just going to bottle 'em up and let them rest a few months. If they never really carbonate, no big deal. Well, I might prime the dubbel just a little, because I do want that pretty bubbly.

The summer beers I should wait just a bit to make. They are, if you're wondering, a bavarian weizen, a wit and a blonde ale. Each should have pleasing interesting yeast character, gentle bitterness and a soft but tasty malt character.

And the standards I will get in the rotation as I see fit. They are, if you're wondering, a bitter, a brown and an amber. Right now, and this is not a prediction about what I will do, I want to make the amber next.

I love statistics. From beertown.org:
Forty percent of beer sales happen during 7 key weeks leading up to Super Bowl, Memorial Day (Indy 500), Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's. 40 percent of beers sales is roughly 81 million barrels. Divided by 7 key weeks equals 11.6 million barrels per key week.
Roughly 5.7 percent of annual U.S. beer sales happens during each key week. With 330.67 12-oz beer equivalents per barrel, each key week would include sales of the equivalent of 3,835,772,000 12-oz beer servings or roughly 19 beers per U.S. adult during the sales week leading to Memorial Day.

Last Thursday found me making an IPA. With a few experimental excepetions, I say of every beer I make that it is going to be good. Nevertheless, this one is going to be good. The recipe was .75 lbs. 10-20L british crystal, .38 lbs. Carastan (35L), and 11 lbs. Maris Otter hopped with .5 oz. Chinook (60 min), .5 oz. each cascade and amarillo (30 min), .25 oz. each cascade and amarillo for 15 min, 1 oz. each cascade and amarillo for 1 minute. I'll dry hop it when I rack it. The mash was at 149 degrees for 75 minutes. I went over temp for a period of the mash, but i'm not too worried. We shall see what results I get. 78% attenuation will be enough, and it's California Ale yeast, so there's a good chance I get it.

Perhaps the most interesting portion of this beer is the water treatment. I skipped the pH stabilizer and used gypsum to get my target pH--that means I was brewing with Burtonized water, a first for me.

Obviously, I was seeking an American IPA but not too extreme. I look for high attenuation to give it a dry finish, lots of citrusy hop character backed by solid malt. About 55 IBU and an O.G. of 1.065. To repeat, I was seeking an American IPA.