THE PLAN:Last year I tried something crazy... I brewed a 1 gallon experimental batch of an oak bark ale, based off of a recipe in Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers. I liked how it turned out for the most part... with some minor adjustments, I think I could make a really killer 2nd version of it, all grain and 5 gallons this time. I decided that the base beer I'd use was a Belgian Specialty Ale or maybe a Belgian Tripel... very close styles. I used some cranberries in it last time to balance out the dry oaky taste, and I plan to use them again. With the oak, I thought I'd use some oak cubes in the secondary to add a little more oak flavor to the mix. So here we go...
THE RECIPE:
15# Belgian Pilsner
3/4# Caravienne
1/4# Aromatic Malt
2# Table Sugar
1 oz Fuggles (60)
1/2 oz Willamette (15)
1/2 oz Fuggles (10)
24 oz Craisins
24 oz Fresh Cranberries
Lightly Toasted Oak Chips (not sure how much I'm adding)
7/10 BREWDAY:
Brewday was mayhem. I nailed my strike temp, and it stayed exactly where it was supposed to be for the full 90 minutes. BUT, somehow my gravity was way way lower than what was projected, even at 65% efficiency. I was freaking out a bit. But, I chilled, collected 7 gallons of wort and decided to do a 2 hour boil, plus I still had 2#'s of table sugar to add. Pre-boil gravity was 1.044, after 2 hr boil and addition of 2#s of sugar, SG was 1.082
7/23 RACKED TO 2ND:
Time to get this puppy on the oak & cranberries. I added 24 oz. of craisins, 24 oz. of fresh crushed cranberries, and about an ounce of light toast french oak chips to the bottom of a freshly sanitized carboy, then racked the tripel on top. Planning on keeping it on here for about a week. Gravity check before adding it on top of the cranberries was 8/1.002... whoa!
7/31 GRAVITY CHECK: Rose to 10/1.015, so the cranberries did add some sugar!
8/1 RACKED TO 3RD:
Another gravity check shows that it went down to 9.6/1.012, racked it off of the cranberries and oak. This tastes amazing! Still a little sweeter than I wanted, but has a nice warming dry finish. Can't wait for Thanksgiving!
8/7 GRAVITY CHECK: Down to 9.2/1.010
8/22 GRAVITY CHECK: Down even further now - 8.2/1.003
Planning on bottling soon, going to do the 750mL belgian corked bottles like I did for the saison. And then we'll keep our mitts off of these until Thanksgiving!
9/19 BOTTLING:
Was brewing my pumpkin ale today and had some time to bottle this batch. I tried to used as many Belgian 750mL bottles as possible, and a few 12 oz.
11/10 TASTING:
Did a thai dinner tonight with Dave & Megan and decided to pop one of these open to see how it's coming along. TRAGEDY... it appears that they're not carbonated at all. :-( Did something happen or did I pull a major faux pas and forget to add priming sugar before I bottled :-S Oh god, say it ain't so.
11/11 RE-TASTING:
Tried another bottle, this one was a 12 oz capped bottle - same result... nothing at all. BARNACLES!!! I'm going to test one more and see if it produces the same results. If it does, then I'm going to have to do one of two things: 1) open every bottle up, throw some carb tabs in, then recap/recork and wait another couple of weeks. 2) open every bottle up, mix up some priming sugar, and distribute between all of them OR pour them all back into the racking bucket and re-rack to bottle, cap/cork, and wait a couple of weeks. I would just choose the former of the two options, but I've experienced some problems recently with the carb tabs I have. I carb tabbed some Oktoberfests and Brown Rice Lagers and they came out flat and had chunks of the tabs floating around. Then there's the question of adding more yeast. Oh, and there's the added bonus of not having enough corks and hoods to re-cork this batch. I'll have to either drive an hour to Plainfield to buy more, or order some online. Did I mention how much this sucks?
