Cubslover

Recipes 

Belgian ales are somewhat of a mystery to me, I read around and peiced together what I thought was a good recipe. Sorry for so many "recipe" threads. I don't have a local Homebrew store so I am looking to order for my next few batches.

6lb Briess Munich LME (50% Munich/50% base)
1.5lb Belgian Candi Brown Syrup (too much?)
2lb Maris Otter
8oz CaraMunich 20

1oz Hallertau (4.4%AA) - 60min
1oz Hallertau (4.4%AA) - 10min

Wyeast Belgian Ardennes Activator

1.065 OG
1.017 FG
6.4% ABV
20 IBU

The only thing I doubt is the amount of hops. With that sugar, I thought of adding another 1oz of Hallertau somewhere in there to balance out the sweetness.

__________________
"Some people are still alive only because it's illegal to kill them."

"To Clone" List:
- Sammy Smith's Winter Welcome
- Southern Tier Choklat Stout
- Rogue Dead Guy Ale
- Three Floyd's Gumballhead

gravity84

Recipes 

Special B is a great malt to add to these and takes well to extract brewing. A light crystal malt will help with head retention and body and a light addition of chocolate malt could also add some depth to the malt profile. Also, your late boil hop addition is a bit hefty. I like my trappist ales with a lot of yeast character, and I think that much hop, that late in the boil, could compete for attention on the nose.

As far as how much sugar? It's up to you really. The main reason to add sugar is to increase alcohol without increasing body. This is most important for AG brews, whose grain bills, in order to get up to ~7% ABV, can be quite large, and therefore could result in a lot of unfermentables. For an extract brew, you can probably taper it down to about 1 lb, make up for the rest of the fermentables in extract.

Cubslover

Recipes 

Thanks. I thought about 1.5oz -60 and .5oz at 5 or so.

I read up on how authentic Dubbels use candi syrup to get the plum/rasin/date flavors instead of Special B (which is more common here). I was shooting for an authentic Dubbel style recipe.

As far as light crystal, I thought the CaraMunich was the best of both worlds, giving the head retention and body characteristics of Crystal/Caramel while staying in a Munich malt . I'll read up a bit more and probably switch some things around.

__________________
"Some people are still alive only because it's illegal to kill them."

"To Clone" List:
- Sammy Smith's Winter Welcome
- Southern Tier Choklat Stout
- Rogue Dead Guy Ale
- Three Floyd's Gumballhead

Native302

Recipes 

Belgians are mainly pilsner malt, so I'd use a pils DME or LME with some steeping grains like special b, caramunich, flaked oats, and I'd use Table sugar (only because I like my Belgians on the lighter side of the spectrum) or you could get a lb of d180 from candisyrup.com and be straight. Whatever you do it'll be yours and should be great.

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theonetrueruss

Recipes 

I'm planning an extract doubble in a while and just got my ingredients... going with:

recipe designed for 6G batch (expect .5G loss to kettle/trub, and .5 loss to primary fermenter... leaves 5G for bottling.

8 lbs olden light DME
1 lb munich LME
2 lbs D2 candi syrup
1 oz Kent Goldings at 60 mins, and 1 oz Styrian goldings at 15 mins
I might sub 1 lb of the D2 with 1lb of table sugar though for a little more lightness.. of course the slightly more ntense flavor and darkenss would be good too... originally I was going to go with 2 lbs of D1 but the HBS was out so I took D2. Should be yummy.