Quad advice

[FatDragon]

I plan on making a Quadrupel for my annual big beer, which will be bulk aged for several months and then bottle aged for several months before it becomes a regular drinker. I'm planning to go with roughly the CSI Westy 12 clone recipe of ~45% pils, ~45% pale malt, ~10% (homemade) very dark candi syrup, though I might toss in some Carabohemian for fun as well.

My main issue right now is the question of yeast. Being in China, liquid yeast isn't an option. Dry yeast options include M31 (Belgian Trippel), M47 (Belgian Abbey), and Danstar/Lallemand Abbaye. I should be able to get Safbrew/Fermentis' Abbey yeast if that's the best option (do they still call it Abbaye as well?). The other option is to get a couple bottles of Rochefort 6 and build up a starter from them - I have other options among Belgian/Trappist brands here but Rochefort 10's my favorite Trappist brew so I'm leaning towards their yeast if I bottle harvest.

So, what yeast should I pick up for this brew? Is there anything else I should know before I get started?

 

[FatDragon]

Any chance someone can chime in here? I just ordered a couple Rochefort 6's for yeast harvesting, and I'm currently looking at 44% Pils (Castle), 37.7% Pale Malt (Weyermann), 3.1% CaraBohemian (Weyermann), and 15.1% dark Homemade Candi Syrup (some at flameout and some in the fermenter, I'm thinking).

Any thoughts?

 

[madscientist451]

I made the Westy clone recipe, used WL 500, bulk aged for a year and it came out great.
Pulling a portion of the wort, boiling it down (a reduction) and then returning it to the main boil is essential. I used Belgian malts and candi-syrup. Just Pils and Pale Malt, Castle Chateau. The candi-syrup goes into the main boil after the reduction is added back in. I dont think it would mix well being added to the fermenter.
No way is it a "regular drinker" though, I pull a bottle out on special occasions and let the rest age some more. It has a somewhat boozy, wine like character and richness that has to be sipped and savored, not guzzled like a lager.
I've never tried any of the dry yeasts you mention so I'm not sure which would be the best. There may not be a "best", just "different"
Another consideration is to make your batch size match a carboy for long term aging with minimal headspace.
I made a 4 gallon batch that went into a 5 gallon primary fermenter, then racked most of it to a 3 gallon carboy for aging. The extra gallon was actually less than that accounting for trub and so I had another 1/2 gallon jug of it, that I used as taste samples.
If you brew bigger batches, you could split it and try your different dry yeasts and see what happens. Good Luck

Edit: I also added a servomyces capsule to the last 10 mininutes of the boil, on advice from my LHBS. Haven't done any comparison brews without it, so can't say how well it worked.

 

[bonecitybrewco]

Safbrew BE-256 will work up to 11%. So there's that option. The Mangrove Jack's are not really suitable to the dark strong style from what I can see.

Honestly, the Rochefort 10 idea sounds great, but you're going to need a LOT of it to gather enough yeast to build a healthy culture.

 

[andrewmaixner]

Lallemand Abbaye would be better than Safbrew Abbaye. They are very different yeasts.
I brewed and organized a test for my club of the trappist/belgian ale yeasts, and found that Lallamand is mostly similar to the WLP500 Chimay yeast, (though both lack some characteristics of the actual chimay beers.) Of the dry yeasts available, Lallemand Abbaye was the top-rated. Safbrew has less "trappisty" character than others, and was more neutral. Only T-58 was rated worse than Safbrew, and it was the dead-last rated.

Of course, all of the liquid strains were rated higher than the dry strains, except for some people who did not care for the Ardennes wet strain and preferred the lallemand dry.


If you can get wet, though, Westmalle and Duval were favorites, with chimay, ardennes, and dry lallemand next ranked.

 

[stonebrewer]

You can get Chimay in China, so why not use that? I have not been to Wuhan but I have been relatively close (Hangzhou, Suzhou, Huzhou, Guilin, and Quzhou for instance). In most of those places I have been able to find pretty good Trappist beers with some work. I would snag a few bottles and grow up the yeast from them. Make sure you determine if they use a different bottling yeast first though, as some do. Your plan for using the Rochefort 6 should work as well. I have read a couple of people had good success with Rochefort 8, so I assume 6 may be easier as it may have more viable yeast left in the dregs. Good luck!!

 

[FatDragon]

I made the Westy clone recipe, used WL 500, bulk aged for a year and it came out great.
Pulling a portion of the wort, boiling it down (a reduction) and then returning it to the main boil is essential. I used Belgian malts and candi-syrup. Just Pils and Pale Malt, Castle Chateau. The candi-syrup goes into the main boil after the reduction is added back in. I dont think it would mix well being added to the fermenter.
No way is it a "regular drinker" though, I pull a bottle out on special occasions and let the rest age some more. It has a somewhat boozy, wine like character and richness that has to be sipped and savored, not guzzled like a lager.
I've never tried any of the dry yeasts you mention so I'm not sure which would be the best. There may not be a "best", just "different"
Another consideration is to make you batch size match a carboy for long term aging with minimal headspace.
I made a 4 gallon batch that went into a 5 gallon primary fermenter, then racked most of it to a 3 gallon carboy for aging. The extra gallon was actually less than that accounting for trub and I had another 1/2 gallon jug of it, that I used as taste samples.
If you brew bigger batches, you could split it and try your different dry yeasts and see what happens. Good Luck

Certainly not a daily drinker. I tend to drink my "next winter" beers at a rate of about one a week during the winter, handing out the odd bottle as well. I've still got a dozen two year old RISs after giving out several this summer, and I expect to have about the same situation with last year's barleywine by next winter.

Thanks for the heads up on the reduction on the side - I like using that technique in big and complex beers, but I wasn't sure if it would be suitable for a Quad.

The batch size is a good thing to mention - the last couple big one-year beers I've made were smaller batches and didn't quite fill up the headspace of my carboy. Fortunately, they were styles that didn't fear a bit of oxidation for the sherry/port notes, but I'm planning for this batch to be big enough to fill up the carboy this time around.

Safbrew BE-256 will work up to 11%. So there's that option. The Mangrove Jack's are not really suitable to the dark strong style from what I can see.

Honestly, the Rochefort 10 idea sounds great, but you're going to need a LOT of it to gather enough yeast to build a healthy culture.

Roche 6 should be a bit more viable out of the bottle, so I'm thinking a couple bottles stepped up 3-4 times each should get me to a decent pitch rate. We'll see as I start building up the starter.

Lallemand Abbaye would be better than Safbrew Abbaye. They are very different yeasts.
I brewed and organized a test for my club of the trappist/belgian ale yeasts, and found that Lallamand is mostly similar to the WLP500 Chimay yeast, (though both lack some characteristics of the actual chimay beers.) Of the dry yeasts available, Lallemand Abbaye was the top-rated. Safbrew has less "trappisty" character than others, and was more neutral. Only T-58 was rated worse than Safbrew, and it was the dead-last rated.

Of course, all of the liquid strains were rated higher than the dry strains, except for some people who did not care for the Ardennes wet strain and preferred the lallemand dry.

If you can get wet, though, Westmalle and Duval were favorites, with chimay, ardennes, and dry lallemand next ranked.

Liquid is unavailable but I'll keep Lallemand/Danstar Abbaye in mind as a backup if my harvested Rochefort 6's don't take off.

You can get Chimay in China, so why not use that? I have not been to Wuhan but I have been relatively close (Hangzhou, Suzhou, Huzhou, Guilin, and Quzhou for instance). In most of those places I have been able to find pretty good Trappist beers with some work. I would snag a few bottles and grow up the yeast from them. Make sure you determine if they use a different bottling yeast first though, as some do. Your plan for using the Rochefort 6 should work as well. I have read a couple of people had good success with Rochefort 8, so I assume 6 may be easier as it may have more viable yeast left in the dregs. Good luck!!

Yeah, Belgian and German beers have been pretty readily-available for as long as I've been in China as long as you know where to look. They're even starting to get pretty easy to find, with fewer options, even if you don't really know where to look. I was in a brick-and-mortar imports store a couple days ago and checked for options, but the prices were high and the options weren't ideal for what I wanted. Ordered a couple Roche 6's on Taobao for 40 kuai shipped instead. I thought about going with Westmalle Dubbel for the actual Westy yeast, but I prefer Roche 10 to St. Bernardus abt. 12 (which is said to be very close to Westy 12) so I decided to go with the Rochefort for yeast harvesting.

 

[stonebrewer]

I found a huge trove of delicious beers in a WalMart (gulp!) in Hangzhou last time I was there! Are you an expat or native? What do you do in China? Might try to make it there on some future trip...perhaps next summer. What is the local food like? Beer scene? Cheers!

 

[JKaranka]

I mixed some dregs from Rochefort and some other small Belgian breweries. Used 4 bottles, made a small pint starter over a couple of days with it. It fermented 6 gallons of single with no problem whatsoever.

 

[FatDragon]

I found a huge trove of delicious beers in a WalMart (gulp!) in Hangzhou last time I was there! Are you an expat or native? What do you do in China? Might try to make it there on some future trip...perhaps next summer. What is the local food like? Beer scene? Cheers!

Wally world is definitely expanding their beer selection, though in Wuhan it's still pretty vanilla - domestics, mass produced wits, very cheap mass produced (and mostly sub-par but still drinkable) German lagers, schwarzbiers, weizens, and dunkelweizens, Guinness, a couple no-name English ales, and maybe Chimay red and Duvel. Beats the hell out of a few years ago when they carried nothing but domestics and two brands of terrible, expensive German dross.

I'm an American expat but I've been here for quite a while - approaching the decade mark. I teach kindergarten English which is one of those jobs that non-teaching expats typically look down on but for me it's not (only) the path of least resistance but something I'm actually good at and love doing.

Wuhan's a central Chinese melting pot so there's legit food from every region of the country here, but as for the local flavor, it's similar to Hunan food but not quite as spicy, and probably a bit oilier and saltier because that's (unfortunately) how Hubei rolls. There's a lot less legit international food here than in cities like Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing, and Hangzhou, but the market's growing.

The beer is the same way - offhand I know of four local micros/brewpubs, a couple of which sell kegs to other bars around town, and beer's profile is rising steadily so while we don't have the same options in supermarkets or as many bottle shops or beer bars as you would in those other cities, we've got some of all of that; definitely more and more each year.

Be aware if you're planning to visit, there's not a whole lot to do. For tourists and travelers, it's basically a big, generic Chinese city. Like any Chinese city, if you know where to look you can find fascinating stuff to occupy yourself depending on your interests, but most of the city is apartment complexes, shopping malls, and urban sprawl that doesn't really recommend itself to visitors unless they've never seen a big Chinese city before. It's more livable than visitable, if that makes sense.

 

[FatDragon]

Brew notes:

My final recipe:

3.5kg Weyermann Pale Malt
3.5kg Castle Pilsener Malt
1.2kg Homemade Candi Syrup (per a popular thread here, double cooked to 290F) - Dark and stone fruity.
90 min. - 25g Northern Brewer
30 min. - 20g Hallertau
15 min. - 30g Styrian Golding
Harvested Rochefort Yeast

Brewed on Saturday after grinding my grain and cooking my sugar on Friday night. I started my single infusion mash at 66.7C/152F and let it ride with a jacket insulating it for an hour and a half, maybe two hours, at the end of which the mash had dropped about 1C in the middle and 2-3C around the edges.

I boiled for 90 minutes and concentrated about 3.5L of wort over medium-low heat on the side - that heat was enough to concentrate down to a thick extract but not to start significant caramelization or burning by the 90 minute mark when I diluted it with wort and mixed it (and the candi syrup) into the main body of the wort.

I forgot to account for the double-boiloff of wort concentration in my water volumes, so my final volume was about 3L low. I made up for this by pitching the entire 3.5L starter rather than decanting off most of the liquid as I had planned. The pitch rate was lower than optimal because I didn't get a lot of chances to shake my starters as I stepped them up, but fermentation is going gangbusters so there was certainly enough healthy yeast to do the job, if not to do it optimally. I usually just aerate by pouring into the ale pale from the kettle and maybe shaking the pail a bit, but I ran a hand mixer with sanitized mixing attachments in the wort for 4-5 minutes in order to mix a bunch of oxygen into the wort before it started fermenting.

I've currently got the fermentation chamber set to 20C and it's going hard out and maintaining those temps just fine in spite of the ~15C ambient temps outside of the chamber. I'm a little worried that the yeast might have a hard time adapting back to the malt sugars after they consume all of the simple sugars, but I decided to put all the sugar in at the end of the boil rather than step feeding because I didn't want the hassle and the slightly increased chances of infection. So it goes. If we get a nasty stall in a couple days, I'll have to get a packet of Lallemand Abbaye or something, but I'm in RDWHAHB mode and I think the little buggers will do their job just fine.

 

[FatDragon]

If anyone sees this and wants to comment, I'm currently considering whether or not to oak this in secondary. I've got a couple hundred grams of what I believe are medium toast American oak chips, and I was thinking I might give it a month or two on a hundred grams or so in secondary before bottling, maybe after doing some oven toasting on some of the oak chips to get various levels of toast and increase the complexity of the oak contribution. Of note is the question, "Will it actually make a difference?" since a year or two in bottles might significantly diminish the oak flavors anyway.

 

[FatDragon]

Tested today - down to 4 plato (from ~21.5) after ten days fermenting, no noticeable activity but the beer is still very hazy so there's a lot of yeast still in suspension to go along with all of the krausen carnage above the beer level and on inside of the lid. Aroma and taste at this point are phenolic with moderate banana esters. The color's a very pretty upper teens on the SRM scale, I'd say maybe 18. I didn't drink much of the gravity sample because under the phenols and banana esters were distinct notes of big green beer, but overall this beer's looking up.

Still interested in oak opinions if you've got 'em. If not I'll just keep talking to myself every once in a while, since I like to let these threads become a sort of supplemental brew log.

 

[Horseflesh]

If it were me, I would skip the oak unless you have the ability to split the batch. While it may be good I bet there's enough going on that you don't need it. You put a lot of work into the the beer, let it stand on its own... IMHO.

I LOVE quads. Brewed one back when I did extract brews. No good. If I had to name it, it would be something like "Raisin Apocalypse." Now that I am a more accomplished AG brewer, I need to find a good recipe and try again.

 

[Brewenstein]

If anyone sees this and wants to comment, I'm currently considering whether or not to oak this in secondary. I've got a couple hundred grams of what I believe are medium toast American oak chips, and I was thinking I might give it a month or two on a hundred grams or so in secondary before bottling, maybe after doing some oven toasting on some of the oak chips to get various levels of toast and increase the complexity of the oak contribution. Of note is the question, "Will it actually make a difference?" since a year or two in bottles might significantly diminish the oak flavors anyway.

I brewed a quad last year, but made 10 gallons so I could age some in a 3.5 gallon bourbon barrel I have. (It was in the barrel for 5-6 months - this was the barrel's third use.) Primed and bottle conditioned the rest. Kegged the barrel version and bottled from there once carbed. It is very good. The bourbon and oak do cover up some the belgian flavors, but I would do it again. So I say go for it, but maybe with only a gallon or so and just keep the rest as a regular quad.

 

[FatDragon]

I brewed a quad last year, but made 10 gallons so I could age some in a 3.5 gallon bourbon barrel I have. (It was in the barrel for 5-6 months - this was the barrel's third use.) Primed and bottle conditioned the rest. Kegged the barrel version and bottled from there once carbed. It is very good. The bourbon and oak do cover up some the belgian flavors, but I would do it again. So I say go for it, but maybe with only a gallon or so and just keep the rest as a regular quad.

Good idea. I racked to secondary a couple days ago and had just about half a gallon extra that went into a smaller jug. I'll get some oak ready and oak that half gallon, then at bottling time I'll fill the jug the rest of the way from the carboy to get a gallon of oaked quad and a little under five gallons of regular.

 

[FatDragon]

Bottling day was a month and a half ago so I filled the oak jug and then filled up ten or eleven bottles with that beer. I then tossed about a pound of chopped, frozen, then steamed cherries in the jug and racked another gallon in there before filling some 35-40 bottles with the base beer.

I cracked open an experimental bottle a couple weeks later with a friend who has a brewpub and we both thought it turned out excellent for such a young quad - and that's where we came up with the name Cherry Juice Quad because it tastes like carbonated, alcoholic cherry juice (in a good way). That's the base beer that had exactly zero cherries in it, by the way.

I finally bottled the cherry oak variant last weekend, so now I've got about 50-55 bottles aging on a shelf. The sample of the cherry oak version that I tasted at bottling was thinner and drier than the base beer and had a much harsher alcoholic bite than the base, so it's gonna need time to mellow.

In the meantime, I know it's early to submit but I've sent in three bottles of the base version to a homebrew competition going on this weekend in the southwestern city of Kunming: the first leg of the Chinese Masters Cup. If it places I'll have three more bottles earmarked for the final in Beijing later this year. Even if it doesn't place, hopefully they'll at least send score sheets this year (they didn't last year) so I can get some good notes.

 

[passedpawn]

Bottling day was a month and a half ago so I filled the oak jug and then filled up ten or eleven bottles with that beer.

FWIW I love seeing your brewing posts. Thanks for the regular contributions from over there. If I ever get back to Hefei, which is unlikely, I will be looking you up.

 

[FatDragon]

FWIW I love seeing your brewing posts. Thanks for the regular contributions from over there. If I ever get back to Hefei, which is unlikely, I will be looking you up.

Thanks for the feedback. It warms my cockles to see that someone actually reads these and they're not just anonymous brew logs. Either way I enjoy writing them because I process better this way, and they're fun to go back and read later, so even if nobody read them I'd keep them up for the occasional special brew like this one.

 

[stonebrewer]

@FatDragon - what do you attribute the cherry juice flavor to, the homemade candi syrup? Planning a quad soon and thinking about making it per my recipe, but may split the batch and shoot for your results as they sound intriguing!

Finalizing plans soon for my next trip to Asia...not sure if I will get to China or not, but it is one of the options. Cheers!

 

[FatDragon]

@FatDragon - what do you attribute the cherry juice flavor to, the homemade candi syrup? Planning a quad soon and thinking about making it per my recipe, but may split the batch and shoot for your results as they sound intriguing!

Finalizing plans soon for my next trip to Asia...not sure if I will get to China or not, but it is one of the options. Cheers!

What do you get when you cross an elephant and a rhinoceros? Elephino.

As a guess, I suspect the yeast selection, pitch rate, fermentation temperature, candi sugar, and wort concentration all played a part, meaning I doubt I could ever intentionally recreate it...