Belgian IPA advice

[Sadu]

I'm brewing a saison tomorrow and have some spare room in the kettle so I thought it might be cool to split the batch and do a Belgian-style IPA.

The grain bill will be pils with a splash of wheat and maybe a tiny amount of caramunich or aromatic. I was thinking I could pull the first runnings for the IPA and use the rest for the saison, doing 2 boils. Maybe a bit of sugar or candi sugar too.

I'm not sure how the yeast works with the hops on this style though. Normally with yeast-dominant styles I go for clean bittering and no late additions. I'm thinking of doing a bittering addition then hitting it with some combination of Tettnang / Motueka / Crystal at 10 mins and whirlpool. Then a dryhop later on. I only have WLP500 yeast available, so hoping this would be suitable.

Do I ferment on the cool side to keep the esters under control or warmer so they don't get masked by hop flavours? Do I hold back on the hop additions a bit, compared with an American IPA?

 

[tennesseean_87]

I loved a clone of Deschutes Chainbreaker I did. It was a lot of fruity hops at flameout, only 40 IBUS, and used the Westmalle yeast. It also had coriander and orange zest. The fruity yeast, hops, zest and coriander all blended together gloriously. I would take a look for a clone recipe and take some ques from that.

I remember Jamil saying to go with a yeast that is fruity when hopping up a Belgian. Hops and spicy phenols clash, fruity esthers and fruity hops pair well.

I have an article based on a thread I did about increasing pipeline diversity (see signature). It's all about doing what you are--making two beers at once without doing a real partigyle.

 

[Sadu]

Had a pretty good brew day with this.

Saison came out at 1.033 before adding sugar which is a 4 points lower than intended and the IPA came out at 1.080 before sugar which is waaaaay higher than I was aiming for, like 20 points higher. I'll probably add some water to the IPA to bring it back down into range.

Guess I should have blended after the mash, but then I don't have a refractometer and cooling gravity samples is kinda a chore so I'll ride with this.

Gravity issues aside, this seems like a pretty cool way to do a double batch if the grain bill is compatible (in this case 24L + 6L) without adding any extra time to the brew day.