Steve973
Well-Known Member
We just bottled our second belgian dark strong ale. We didn't get super great mash efficiency, and we hit 1.084 instead of the expected 1.092 or something like that, but we attenuated down to 1.010 at bottling time, which was much better than we expected. So, we hit our 10% abv goal anyway, and the mouthfeel certainly isn't bad as a result. We made our candi sugar by inverting some turbinado, and that worked out really well - definitely better than buying it from the store. you can definitely notice the flavor/color difference. Now, we used 6 ounces of leftover turbinado sugar to get some good volumes of CO2, and we corked and caged the champagne bottles on Sunday. There was one extra bottle that we'll use for a tester in 2 weeks, and if that went well, we'll start popping corks about a month from bottling time. All in all, the beer will be about five months old at that point since the secondary fermentation lasted about three freakin' months!