Golden Strong Ale

Scored some yeast from the Pike. A bit of their Belgian strain (White Labs 530) which is similar to the one from Westmalle.

4/5: Brew

6# Belgian Pils
6# Marris Otter
1/2# Biscuit malt
1# Flaked Barley

Gave me 5 or so gals. of 16P wort

.6 ozs. 13.3% alpha Simcoe @ 60
2 ozs. Czech Saaz plugs @ 20

Pitched the Pike/Westmalle.

This went into one of my brewing vessels lined with a fresh 33 gal. trash bag liner. There was an article in a recent Zymurgy about the effects of fermenter geometry on flavor profile. So I thought I'd try something in that direction. This setup is good for a shallow (8"-9"), open ferment. We'll see what happens.

4/11: Transfer

Into a clean, sanitzed glass carboy. Then added a syrup made up of 1 and 1/2# corn sugar and a quart or so of water.

Not being one to simply change one aspect of the process at a time; the other novel approach I'm trying with this batch is a new way of using sugar. I skipped the sugar addition in the kettle and racked the beer onto a syrup solution just past high krausen instead. Tried this to help ensure a greater degree of attenuation. Yeast will ferment simple sugars preferentialy. In a wort of complex malt sugars and simple sugars, there's a chance that as the simple sugars are completely fermented there might be viability issues that affect the fermentation of the more complex malt sugars. Leaving a relatively high terminal gravity. In this case I'm adding the simple sugars after a fair amount of the complex sugars have been taken up. So, we get attenuation of the complex sugars and nearly complete fermentation of the simple sugars and we hope a nice dryish, "digestable" glass of beer. Jamil can explain it better.