robertjohnson

Recipes 

Hey, so I'd like to brew up a sessionable belgian pale ale, but the only yeast strains available to me are both trappist high gravity style. I've looked around recipes for enkels and other session ales, which mostly seem to tend towards WLP515 or 550.
Could I brew up an enkel and ferment it with the 3787/500 or would it not turn out? could I then rack it and pitch a dubbel/tripel on the yeast cake? should I still make a starter for the enkel if I pitch a dubbel/triple afterwards? should I mash higher (around 155 rather than 152) to prevent it from drying out as much? sorry for all the questions, but I'm sort of in the dark on this and REALLY want to get some funky belgians going on.

Oldsock

Recipes 

3787 is my favorite Belgian strain, it will do fine in a lower gravity ale. It is the Westmalle strain and they do a low gravity Monk's Ale with it. I am not as big a fan of 500 (Chimay), too much banana for my taste in a Belgian.

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Check out The Mad Fermentationist for my adventures in fermentation (cheese, bread, ginger beer plant, and of course plenty of funky beer).

SpanishCastleAle

Recipes 

The WLP500 is very fruity and the 3787 is spicy (for lack of a better word). I recently tapped an Enkle (of sorts) that I brewed just to propagate yeast for a Tripel and the yeast 'spice' is evident. I did just what you mentioned and mashed a bit higher and it didn't finish too terribly low. It actually didn't finish much lower than the much higher OG Tripel I brewed with it's yeast cake. IIRC, it went from 1.048 to 1.008 or so (edit: just checked and it was 1.048-1.009).

But you can def taste the yeast.

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Early brewers were primarily women, mostly because it was deemed a woman's job. Mesopotamian men, of some 3,800 years ago, were obviously complete assclowns and had yet to realize the pleasure of brewing beer.- Beer Advocate

robertjohnson

Recipes 

Awesome, thanks so much for the help. I'd probably prefer the 3787 for my tastes too. This will be my first belgian beer and my first time using liquid yeast. The yeast is super old though, manufactured in May 07 or something like that, so I'll be making quite a starter. (There's not a very high turnaround at my LHBS, but they said they'd refund me if it didn't propagate).

btw. My grandpa used to dance at the spanish castle back when it was just a music hall.