Archives: January 2011 Archives - brewing.twigfu.com
Yesterday, I brewed my first Lambic… and dove in feet first with a traditional turbid mash technique.
Borrowing notes from the Burgundian Babble Belt, Mike T’s blog and The Liddil Lambic Lesson I did the following recipe and mash schedule:
Thanks to Shelby from Final Gravity for stopping by and lending a hand (and sharing some tasty Oktoberfest and Winter Warmer!).
Last night I took a sample of the Group Westvleteren 12. All-in-all not a bad brew.
I’ve never had the original so I don’t have a frame of reference for comparison. I can, however, describe this one.
With all of the holidays coming and going along with the increased needs of work and home, it’s been a bit harder to hide out in the garage for half a day firing up the old brew rig.
So, I put together a small 2 gallon mash tun (found it discounted at Target too) and got myself a 5 gallon steel stock pot.
The mash tun uses a steel braid for the manifold connect to each end of a T fitting similar to this build. I planned to batch sparge and estimated a maximum amount of grain at around 4.5lbs. Mixing that grain bill with about 6qts of water was a pretty tight fit.
Recently I’ve been reading quite a bit of the blog The Mad Fermentationist. Particularly of interest were the three dark saisons that he has done. I’ve often thought that the farmhouse ale style has a lot of room to play with different ingredient combinations.
So, this recipe draws from his Fig Honey Anise Dark Saison and Dark Saison with Black Cardamom.
The following describes an all-grain technique
Getting ready to mash
I use for making yeast starter wort with an 8 cup French Press coffee maker.
The idea is to do a single step mash with a batch sparge in the french press and use the plunger to separate the wort from the grain.
I used the following recipe to extract approximately 800mL of 1.045OG wort: