#patersbier

Review #7

My next brew, Patersbier:

Wanted to go for something simple and quick for my first extract brew as I didn’t want to be waiting seven weeks to realise I’d messed it up.

Well it's been a week so I took a gravity reading and lo and behold 1.008.  That's the best attenuation I have ever gotten.  If beersmith is correct I should be at 5% abv.  I didn't take another gravity reading after adding the candi syrup but beersmith should be close.  It was right on for my FG calculation after adding the extra water into my recipe.  

So everything is great right?  Close, I pushed a bung all the way into my carboy.  Luckily it had been sitting in starsan for 10 minutes so there should be no problem other than getting it back out.

It tastes very good.  Sweet and a little caramely with the fruit esters I was expecting from the Belgian Trappist yeast.  Should be a nice light summer beer.  I might have actually succeeded in brewing something my wife will drink.

This is what it looks like.  it should clear up in conditioning.

I've been planing on doing a Patersbier and a Belgian Dark Strong for a while.  A duality of beers kind of thing.  I had some free time this Memorial Day and decided to do the easier beer first.  There was no Memorial Day significance the time just fit.

I started with the  Northern Brewer Patersbier extract kit and that was all I was planing on using until "I made a huge mistake".

Ingredients

.5 lbs CaraPils

.5 oz German Tradition Hops (60 min)

1 oz Saaz Hops (.5 60 min .5 10 min)

6 lbs Pilsen LME

Wyeast 3787 Trappist High Gravity yeast

Since this was a dry run of a sort for my Belgian Dark Strong (aka quad) I used some extra steps that I wouldn't normally use

treated the CaraPils as if it needed to be mashed.by trying to get my kettle to hold 160 which wasn't that easy,

Used a large strainer bag instead of a muslin bag

"Sparged" the CaraPils

Used a hop bag instead of just throwing it in.

Irish Moss

Yeast Nutrient

Aerator with stone.

Every thing was going fine until it came time to chill the wort.  Some how I massively misjudged how much wort there was.  I thought I was under 5.5 gallons so I topped off in the kettle and added a little extra to account for the displacement of the chiller.

It turns out I ended up with an extra 1.5 gallons of wort.  What I should have done was to put the wort back in the kettle and boil it until I got back down to about five gallons but  I didn't think about that until after the yeast was pitched.  What I did instead was add a pound of golden belgian candi syrup that I happen to have for my aforementioned quad.

Since a lot of the flavor of this beer comes from the yeast and the candi syrup tastes awesome I'm still pretty optimistic about the beer.  It's still going to come in light at around 4.2% but it could be just the thing for a hot summer day.