I've been talking with my club about this, and most people seem to have serious reservations about the traditional recipe. Essentially they're saying that we won't get the dark fruit/etc flavors from the syrup like we're hoping. I trust these people a lot (they leave competitions with wreaths of medals around their neck, and one is currently the NYS Homebrewer of the Year by a large margin) but I think we should go ahead with things anyway. For one, I've already bought the ingredients
But also, even if it's not a good Westy clone, or a good quad, it'll at least still be good beer, right?
Tell them to pick up Brew Like A Monk and read the section about Westvleteren and the 12. Stan (the writer) went on a serious quest through Belgium talking to all the Trappist brewers about all the details they were willing to share.
Westvleteren kept some secrets, but they shared a lot of cold hard facts. Below are the things we know for sure, providing that Brother Joris didn't lie to Stan, which I seriously doubt.
There are only two grains used, Belgian Pale and Belgian Pils, and they get it from Dingemans. We don't know their mash schedule, or if they use undermodified malts.
They use Westmalle yeast, purchased from Westmalle and pitched on brewday. See the first page for fermentation details, we have the full schedule and temps. We don't know pitching amount in cell count per ml, but its probably inline with most other belgian brewers, ie underpitching compared to standard american rates by about 20-30%.
They use a large amount of sugar syrup in the beer. We don't know how much but Stan estimates between 16 and 20% of the total sugars come from the syrup. We also don't know how they make it.
The SRM of the beer is 38.
The secret of this beers very delicious aspect obviously lies in how modified their malts are, how much sugar they use and how they make it, boil time (all we know is at least 60 minutes), their mashing schedule and what kind & hop much hops to use. Its a balancing act because this beers flavors blend so well together.
There are some educated guesses as to what hops they used based off information that has been gleaned from very high profile people over the years (including papazian and michael jackson) and people feel pretty comfortable when they used all pellets it was northern brewer for bittering, and styrian goldings and hersbucker for flavor. They now use a hop extract for bittering.
This is a lot of information, but still lacking a significant amount. One of my goals for this Brew & Swap was to see who is going to get the closest when I taste them all against the real thing
