Duvel Clone or Belgian Golden Strong

 One of my favorite styles of beer is the Belgian Golden Strong, and the classic commercial example is Duvel. When operating the brewery in San Miguel, I always tried to have this beer in the rotation, and as delicious as this beer is, the ingredients are as simple as you can get.

Pilsner malt and refined sugar.

You could complicate it if you want to by producing some inverted sugar to replace the refined white sugar, but I haven't found it to improve the beer, and I like to keep things simple if the results are good. The best yeast I've found over the years that comes the closest to mimicking that unique flavor of Duvel is White Labs WLP545 yeast, and I won't brew this beer if I don't have any to pitch.

Now, as simple as I like to keep this recipe, I was forced to use some acidulated malt in my latest batch in order to drop the mash pH to 5.3.

One other caveat: I didn't get the efficiency from my mash that I calculated the recipe based on. I was expecting to be in the low 80%, but ended up with 78% and was forced to add some additional sugar to make my preferred original gravity. Then, rather than do math, I just dumped in 2.2 pounds of sugar when in fact I only needed 1 pound. Soooo... my O.G. came in at 1.079 instead of the 1.074 that I was shooting for. Sooo... the alcohol came in higher. If I'm not mistaken, Duvel is 8.5% ABV, and this beer came in at 9.3% ABV. Not quite as drinkable at that higher percentage, but it will still be a crowd-pleaser for those that like their Belgians boozy.

The following is my recipe as intended, and I've included the discrepancies in parenthesis for your reference.

Recipe:

I brewed an 11 gal. post boil batch anticipating 2 full 5 gallon kegs after fermentation. I referenced Bru'n water yellow bitter water profile and used 100% reverse osmosis water.

Efficiency 84% (actual 78%),  Attenuation 87% (actual 92%),  ABV 8.5% (actual 9.3), SRM 4.5, IBU 35, OG 1.074 (actual 1.079), FG 1.008, PH 5.3

23 lbs. Pilsner malt (Weyermann)

.75 lbs. Acid malt 

4.4 lbs. or 2 kilos (actual 3 kilos) refined sugar at start of boil

Mash in at 152f. in 6 gal. h2o for 60 minutes.

Sparge with 10 gal. for 45 minutes with 170f. h2o 

Boil 90 minutes with:

60 min. add: 65 gram Warrior 13% a/a est. 34 ibu's

20 min. add: 20 gram Tettnang 2.1 a/a% for est. 1 ibu's

Chilled down to 68f., transfer to fermenter and pitched 3 pkgs WLP545 yeast. 

After 3 days raised temperature to 72f.

After 3 more days raised temp. to 75f.

After 3 more days lowered temp. to 62f. for 1 day.

Transfer to kegs and lagered in kegerator for 2 weeks at 40f.

Lessons learned - Add sugar to achieve gravity a little at a time if needed, checking gravity as I make the additions.

Cheers!

Bottle In A Bag

Improvising with Style: A Homebrew Hack Worth Keeping

 I ran into a bit of a special needs situation last week, and figured it was worth sharing—not for sympathy, but because this is what I love about homebrewing. No matter how many batches you’ve clocked, something will always go sideways. A missing part, a busted seal, or in this case a completely disgusting bottling bucket. The unexpected shows up, uninvited, and dares you to stay creative.

So here's the scene, I'm in my element puttering around the brew cave and I'm needing to bottle a batch of porter. Easy enough—except the only bottling buckets I had looked like they’d been dragged through a gravel lot and left to soak in dirty dishwater for a few years. Discolored, scratched to hell, and definitely not the sterile environment you’d want for your pristine, freshly fermented beer. Unless, of course, you're into doctoring your brew with unknown bacteria strains and suggesting that it's a Belgian such or such.

What to do?

Now, for many of you who've wasted time following this blog know, I normally ferment in garbage cans lined with food-grade plastic bags—sterile, easy to salvage yeast, cheap. Turns out, those same bags are the perfect workaround when your bottling bucket is more biohazard than brewery tool.

Here’s the move: line the nasty bucket with a clean, sanitized bag. That way, your beer never touches the inside of the bucket, and you keep the precious liquid safely quarantined away from those bacteria harboring crevices. But what about the spigot connected to your nasty bucket you may ask? Well, you're still going to use it but you will simply re-install it with the bag in place.

First, prepare yourself. Wash your hands. Like, really wash them and I like to dip them in a solution of acid to be safe to make sure I'm not introducing anything into the bag when I'm installing the spigot. 

Drop the bag liner into the bucket, I had to trim off some excess, a couple feet at the top. It was comically tall as my fermenting garbage cans are about 15 gallon compared to this 6 gallon bottling bucket. With bag in place I insert the spigot as normal through the usual hole in the bucket, pushing it through and up against the bag. Then, from the inside of the bag at the point where the threaded part of the spigot pushed up against the bag I pressed on the washer and then threaded on the nut over the bag. This locks the spigot in place and seals the bag tight around it.

Now, with everything snug, I pierced a little hole in the bag at the mouth of the spigot to let the beer flow through. Bottle as usual. Beautiful. The beer stayed protected in its sanitary cocoon while I bottled like usual. When I finished, I dumped the dregs, pulled the spigot, and lifted out the bag—no scrubbing, no sanitizing, no bucket shame. The bucket underneath? Still filthy. Still disgusting but it never touched a drop of beer.

I liked the results so much I’d use this trick even if the bucket was brand new. It’s too easy not to. And in homebrewing, anything that saves you time, cuts out cleanup, and still treats the beer right? That’s my kind of solution.

Cheers.

Kirkland Helles lager

Best beer value

 Kirkland Signature — a name that conjures bulk toilet paper and thirty-pound bags of trail mix — also makes beer. Or rather, they commission beer. And not just any beer. These cans of budgeted bliss are contract brewed by Deschutes Brewery, which, as far as breweries go, is like finding out the gas station hot dog you just ate was actually made by Thomas Keller.

Their Helles — that’s “light” in German, though in beer it just means “not IPA” — is clear, golden, and practically screams, “Drink me while wearing cargo shorts.” At 4.5% ABV, it’s light enough to keep you from falling face-first into your lawn after three, yet satisfying enough to make you think, “Huh. Maybe Costco does know what they’re doing.”

It’s crisp, bready, ever-so-slightly bitter, and—perhaps most importantly—cheap. $14.60 for a twelve-pack (that’s 276 pesos if you’re playing the home game in Mexico). It even won a gold medal at the 2023 GABF, which makes it, technically, an award-winning beer you can pair with discount socks and an eight-pack of canned tuna.

Meanwhile, back in my kitchen, things were less award-winning and more—how shall I put it—frontier survival. I’d just finished mashing in a batch of my Black Butte Porter clone when the power cut out. Mid-sparge. That’s like getting halfway through brushing your teeth and realizing the water’s been shut off. With no pump to move water from the hot liquor I had to resort to the tried and true technique of scoop, pour and repeat. Like a one-man bucket brigade at a slow moving fire.

Wort collected, I faced another problem: boiling. Not the act, which is simple enough, but the timing. I couldn’t risk starting the boil without knowing I’d be able to chill it down and transfer to the fermenter. Because nothing says “tragedy” like a kettle of lovingly hopped wort gone tepid and sour in the dark.

So I waited. Sanitizing obsessively and checking the lights every ten minutes like a raccoon hoping for leftover pizza. Four hours later, the power blinked back on, and I fired up the burner like I was reviving Frankenstein.

In the end, the beer made it safely to the fermenter and seems, at this point, to be fermenting peacefully—unaware of the domestic drama that brought it into the world. This little mishap did get me wondering whether I should rebuild my old gravity-fed brew setup from California. A solid Plan B, sure, though still powerless against the whole "needing to chill the wort" issue unless I also invest in a hand-cranked glycol chiller powered by anxiety.

Anyway, I’ll keep you posted on how the porter turns out. If nothing else, it’ll pair beautifully with a bulk package of relief and a Kirkland hot dog.

Cheers.