Homebrewing Blog and Resource

The hobby of homebrewing beer

Belgian Dark Strong Ale Recipe

I had a dream of brewing a Grand Cru the other night. Truthfully. It was a good dream, by the way. This style would be another one to brew strong and let condition over a period of a few months. Bottling it up in bomber bottles, the finished beer would make a nice gift. Here is my recipe the Grand Cru style of beer – the Belgian Dark Strong ale.

Boil Size: 7 gallons
Batch Size: 5 gallons

Ingredients

14 lbs Belgian Pale
.5 lbs Belgian Special B malt
3 lbs Belgian Munich malt
1 lbs Amber Candi Sugar
1.25 oz Styrian Goldings Pellets (~5 %AA) boiled for 60 minutes
0.50 oz Styrian Goldings Pellets (~5 %AA) boiled for 15 minutes

Yeast: White Labs WLP545 Belgian Strong Ale

Instructions

Create a mighty yeast starter a few days before you brew session. Mash malts for one hour at 150 degrees F. Boil for 60 minutes, adding hops at the specified times left in the boil.

You can add the candi sugar at 15 minutes left in the boil if you want. You don’t have to boil it for the full hour. Cool down the wort to 68 degrees F and pitch yeast. Ferment until final gravity is reached. If you bottle, prime with enough sugar for a high carbonation. For the keggers, force carbonate to 3.5 volumes of CO2.

Predictions

Original Gravity: 1.097
Terminal Gravity: 1.017
Color: 20.86 °SRM
Bitterness: 31.6 IBU
Alcohol percentage by volume: 10.7%

The style guidelines for this beer call for a rich, complex Belgian ale. Interestingly enough, classic examples of the style have simple malt bills and the complexity in the flavor comes from the addition of simple sugars. I am using candi sugar in this recipe, but I have seen some other ones online that call for honey or plain table sugar. The bitterness of this beer should not overwhelm the maltiness. Although in my recipe the IBUs are on the high range of the style, I always feel like I have to add more hops in my beers.

Brew On!

Previous

Small Batch Brewing

Next

Crush It With A Barley Crusher Grain Mill

4 Comments

  1. Do you think using honey instead of candi sugar would have much effect on the flavor of the beer? And do you remember how much honey the other recipes called for? This is a very tempting beer recipe that I’m going to have to put on my list. I haven’t brewed any Belgian-style beers in a couple of years.

  2. Hi Rhen,

    I think there would be minimal flavor effect if you added the same amount of honey at the same time as my recipe calls for adding the sugar. Adding honey to the boil would most likely drive off the delicate aromas and flavors of the honey.

    Honey is ~95% fermentable and the recipes I saw only called for a pound or two. This small amount wouldn’t be enough for the ~5% of what’s left from the honey after fermentation to shine through in the beer. Adding more and you have more of a mead type beverage – if that’s what you want, then awesomesauce.

    For me, the reason to add sugar or honey to this style is to increase the starting gravity of the wort and thin out the body a bit in the finished beer. Heck, I am being fancy with the use of candi sugar in my recipe. White table sugar would work just as well.

  3. Awesome, thanks for the clarification! My wife’s co-worker does bee-keeping and gives us honey all the time so I have ready access to it. I should start using it in my brewing.

  4. If you have access to honey in bulk like that, then you need to start mead making. It’s much easier than brewing beer and if you can get lots of honey for free, the price of admission is not a deterrent.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén