Safbrew abbaye

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andrewmaixner said:
That pretty much mirrors my experience on the dark ale. Less "Belgian character" than the split T58 batch, and very drinkable.
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Yep, I have a terrible habit of wasting a perfectly good beer 10 days or so into bottle conditioning just to see how it's coming along. Beautiful thick lace on the pale ale, tastes green as expected but overall it's way cleaner than I thought it would be. Will update in a week.
 
Wheelspin said:
Brewhaha, would you say Abbay is good for a Pale Ale as an alternative to Notties or 05 ?
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In the low 60ies, its not as clean as Notty (it still has Belgian character, just very subdued), it's definitely not as flocculent. It is also much more expensive. Attenuation is roughly in the same range.

Never brewed with Abbaye in the hi '60ies, but at that point, US-5 is cleaner anyways. And Us5 is more flocculent as well.

I guess I'll stick to hoppy Belgian-ish brews in winter with Abbaye. Its not like you want an ester bomb in these anyways.
 
So after a couple more weeks the sulfur has faded out. The esters and the phenols are light. Which leads me to my problem with dry yeast. There really isn't enough information about how much yeast is in a package. The manufacturer website says "at least" 70 billion cells. And mr malty says 220 billion. So who really can say how much you pitch. I usually get good results with Belgian beers when I under pitch a little.

That said I'll enjoy the beer while it's on tap but I wouldn't consider entering it into a competition.
 
Overall my Belgian Pale Ale is good. I'm backing off on using this strain again, however. I'm just going to use White Labs 530. The extra $2 makes a world of difference in my book. It's not a bad yeast strain, it's definitely a Belgian. But the word that occurred to me was that it is a joyless yeast strain. A Belgo-American mashup is supposed to be fun, almost whimsical in my book: like Litle Sumpin' Wild. This yeast strain is pretty lifeless for a Belgian so I'm going to skip it and just do smack packs or white labs.
 
I made a Belgian blonde (not really to style) with this yeast on 2/1/2015 -- 1.055 ish. I kegged on 2/14 to cold condition for two weeks. I am having trouble getting it to flocculate (I added 7g of Gypsum and 5g of Calcium Chloride so its not a calcium issue) and fermented side by side with a kolsch yeast, same wort. I waited two weeks and kegged and I am cold crashing in the kegerator. The Kolsch is already pouring transparent, but not quite crystal clear but the belgian abbaye yeast is cloudy and yeasty. I plan on laggering the Kolsch for 4 weeks and laggering/cold conditioning the belgian for 2 weeks before considering them ready to drink. I will post with more results.

The initial tasting, very undercarbed but cold, The Belgian Blonde tastes, well belgian and refreshing, although a bit green but I didn't have the same experience as the other poster who had an apple bomb. I suspect s/he let their temps get out of control. I chugged away in the low/mid 60's.

I will post again after it's had 2 weeks to condition out. I might add some gelatin to encourage the yeast to drop out. From the initial tasting I think this beer will be tasty and refreshing and I think this yeast is a good belgian dry yeast. I am definitely not getting anything offensive from it. A little apple and pear, some clove and spice. I'm not picking up much banana or bubblegum. I don't think it is a saison yeast as I'm not getting a ton of pepper and spice, and it didn't dry out the beer as a saison yeast would, although the beer is on the drier side. I will wait for it to condition and clear up before I make my final eval.
 
The tripel that I made with this yeast is delicious. It was very green after one month of bottle conditioning. It's great now after 3 months of conditioning. It has the appropriate spiciness and flavor that one would expect from a tripel.
I will definitely be making this beer again.
 
Brewed a honey brown which I fermented with Safbrew Abbaye.

SG 1.050
FG 1.006

2 weeks in primary at 75F. Developed horrid sulphur smell and flavour during the first week, but cleared up afterwards. Very flocculent; beer became very clear around the two week mark. Developed a mild estery yeast presence, somewhere between peppery saison and fruity dubbel.

Ramped down to 40F over the course of another week. Very cohesive yeast cake made racking to secondary a breeze: not a speck of trub in the carboy.

While the marketing is misleading (no way this is your average abbaye yeast) and the intitial profile off-putting (that sulphur stench!), the end result may well be quite rewarding. I suspect this is a yeast which enjoys life on the warmer side, and is reluctant to release lots of typical banana esters unless coaxed to do so, either by fermenting quite a bit warmer than Safbrew recommends, or by combining it with another strain.

Overall, I'd use it again. Dubbels, browns, maybe a porter even.
 
I've tried this and have had good results with an OG=1066 brew (good flavour profile, good clarity etc)
I'm having another go now (similar OG) but more complex grain bill and 50g of Tettenang in the boil for 90 minutes. The primary is belting away now with the strongest fermentation smells I have experienced. It will be interesting.
 
Rehydrated and pitched 150g (a 25% underpitch, to encourage ester formation) in to ~1.75bbl of a 1.070 dubbel (mashed at 152F, added ~10% brown sugar, to give you an idea of fermentability) two nights ago. Took off fiercely within about 12 hours. I pitched at around 63.5F (17.5C) and have let it free rise up to 72F (22.5C +/- 0.5C, again, to encourage ester production rather than the phenolic notes a lot of people are describing). Smell coming off the airlock right now is a little fruity, mildly sulfurous. Will report back with how it turns out.
 
Im using this abbaye yeast for the first time aswell. Making a belgian Pale Ale. Im hoping for high attenuation so its a OG 1055 beer. Its been a week in the fermentor and im also only getting sulphur smell. I pitched at 65F and kept it below 68F the first 5 days, added sugar to the fermentor after 3 days. the airlock activity stopped after 6 days so i ramped the temp up to 71F and im going to keep it there for a week and then go colder again.
I guess that ill keep in in the fermentor until the smell has vanished.
 
I think that's an overstatement of splash racking and its effects. It's standard practice in the wine industry to kill sulphur. And when it comes down to it, a little bit of oxidation is way less obnoxious than sulphur, providing you don't get an infection.
 
andrewmaixner said:
Is "splash racked" a euphemism for "oxidized horribly while moving to the keg", or am I misinterpreting that? How did it turn out?
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Oh and on the substance of your question, I didn't really dig the beer that much. I used really cheap 2-row, though, and that may have been the problem. I may not have given the yeast a chance to succeed. I will likely use the Westmalle strain in the future, why mess around. On that note, I think I'm done messing with dry yeast, the savings aren't with it. And I've used lots and lots of dry yeast. Took me a while to come to the conclusion that liquid just makes better beer.
 
I have used it quite a bit (most recently on a Chimay Blue Clone) and will definitely use it again in the future. It produces very authentic Belgian Abbey type profiles in the beer. I always rehydrate before pitching and fermentation typically starts within 4-6 hours. I find flocculation particularly high.
 
This is the first time for me using a dry yeast besides us 05. I really hope ill like it. But we'll see. The people here seems to be very divided. I probably wouldnt use a dried yeast for a classic tripel or similar but for a hoppy belgian it might work just fine. The yeast shouldnt be as pronounced with all that hoppyness in the way...
 
Used abbaye on a quad a few weeks ago. Pitched 2 rehydrated packs at 65F into 1.090 wort. Fermentation took off within 8 hours. I let the temps free rise from 65F to 78F over ~1.5 days, then dropped it to 65F for 5 more days, where it finished at 1.018.

The beer still needs time to condition, but shows strong esters, a touch of fusels, and loads of malt. Great yeast!
 
I made a Patersbier Belgian Pale with this yeast. I am sipping dregs from bottling day now.

8 pounds pilsner, 2 pounds Vienna, and 1/2 Caramunich with a single infusion mash, and a 90 minute boil. 1 ounce Fuggles @60, 1/2 ounce First Gold at 30 and 15.

Pitches Belgian Abbaye at 60 degrees, held for two days. Increased temperature up to 80 over two weeks, and allowed to sit an extra week at 80. Crash cooled down below 40 before bottling.

Lots of floating yeast particulate matter, and not much of a yeast cake. I dont use clarifying agents in ny beer, but with this yeast I would advise it. Also not as dry as I would expect. Attenuated about as well as any dry yeast, without the sort of lovely dryness from a powerful Belgian yeast chewing sugars.

Flavor is clearly Belgian, with lots of apple and pear notes, if not as dry as I would expect from using liquid Belgian yeasts.

Next time, I am paying the couple dollars more for W yeast Trappist High Gravity or Belgian Ardennes.

I wonder if this yeast is truly as stable in dry form, as I am seeing mixed results above. I live in South Texas, where any break down in storage and temperature during shipping will be impactful. Do people of northern areas have Better luck or vice versa?
 
A slightly related update: I re-brewed the belgian dark single that I used Abbaye and T58 for in the past, this time using WLP500 (Chimay strain, formerly "Trappist Ale Yeast") which I had left over from a few different batches last autumn.

I am almost certain that I vastly prefer Abbaye over WLP500 for this style, unless something went horribly wrong with my batch. Fermentation controlled at 65F, so no high-temp issues. Distinct aroma and flavor similar to my previous WLP500 batches.

At least for my (and friends) tastes, on this recipe, Abbaye may be considered a good belgian strain with a mild character, attenuating well while leaving a mild sweetness behind that is not there with some other yeasts.
 
andrewmaixner said:
A slightly related update: I re-brewed the belgian dark single that I used Abbaye and T58 for in the past, this time using WLP500 (Chimay strain, formerly "Trappist Ale Yeast") which I had left over from a few different batches last autumn.

I am almost certain that I vastly prefer Abbaye over WLP500 for this style, unless something went horribly wrong with my batch. Fermentation controlled at 65F, so no high-temp issues. Distinct aroma and flavor similar to my previous WLP500 batches.

At least for my (and friends) tastes, on this recipe, Abbaye may be considered a good belgian strain with a mild character, attenuating well while leaving a mild sweetness behind that is not there with some other yeasts.
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Just curious why you are fermenting so low? Almost all Belgians are brewed higher than 70 F... At least that's what I've read in Brew Like A Monk.
 
TastyAdventure said:
Just curious why you are fermenting so low? Almost all Belgians are brewed higher than 70 F... At least that's what I've read in Brew Like A Monk.
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That's a good question, and I asked it of myself also. For the earlier batches (t58, abbaye) it was because i did it at ambient temp the first time, and liked the result that it gave with those yeasts, so I continued at that temperature.
Now that I have a temperature chamber, I can easily control that and bring the temperature up.

WL does give a chart of yeast characters by temperature range (http://www.whitelabs.com/files/belgianchart_0.pdf), which claims clean/balanced/earthy from 58 to 66F -- I did 65. If i use wlp500 again, I may have to bump it up to the midrange (claim: spicy, light phenol, fruity) again as I did for the previous different beer with which I used it.
 
TastyAdventure said:
Just curious why you are fermenting so low? Almost all Belgians are brewed higher than 70 F... At least that's what I've read in Brew Like A Monk.
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How the commercial brewery does it in a large cylindroconical fermenter and how you need to ferment at home are worlds apart. You can accomplish very much, and in fact end up with a much more pleasing beer, by using a far more restrained fermentation and treating it like a typical ale. The yeast itself, even at standard ale temps, will produce a pronounced flavor without the harsh and solventy mess that most homebrew Belgian styles turn into.
 
highgravitybacon said:
How the commercial brewery does it in a large cylindroconical fermenter and how you need to ferment at home are worlds apart. You can accomplish very much, and in fact end up with a much more pleasing beer, by using a far more restrained fermentation and treating it like a typical ale. The yeast itself, even at standard ale temps, will produce a pronounced flavor without the harsh and solventy mess that most homebrew Belgian styles turn into.
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Interesting. Do you have a source for this? Not that I don't believe you, but I'd like to read more into this
 
:ban::ban:
TastyAdventure said:
Interesting. Do you have a source for this? Not that I don't believe you, but I'd like to read more into this
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http://www.mbaa.com/districts/MidSo...2010-03-13Wheat_Beer_Yeast__Fermentation2.pdf

Increasing hydrostatic pressure decreases ester formation. Thus when you have a large column of water pressing down on the yeast sitting in a conical's cone, that yeast will have tremendous pressure on it. To achieve a desired ester profile, you'd need to change the fermentation or the wort composition when compared to another vessel. In a 5 gallon carboy, the top pressure is basically nil compared to a commercial brewery. They need to ferment much wamer than a homebrewer would. Or I should say they can ferment warmer before it tastes like Barbasol and cheap gin.
 
One more update: the WLP500 clear sugar variant became pretty darn good after a lot of aging and cold conditioning. It became a belgian golden strong.
The Dark sugar variant got better, but the Abbaye version was much superior for my (and my friends) tastes.

I took both WLP500 varients to a beerfest, kicked the kegs, and received high praise from many drunken non-homebrew people, for what it's worth.
 
Brewed an Amber Ale recipe with 2-row, Biscuit, and Caramel 20 on Saturday and pitched a packet of this that night. Read that this strain actually doesn't produce an extreme estery profile unless you deliberately ferment higher, so I went ahead and used it at around 65-68 (ambient temperature of my basement keeps all of my beers in this range) in order to get a clean profile that will let the malt dominate. That, and it's just the yeast I had on hand.

Smelled good from the airlock yesterday, and the yeast was very determined to take off as quickly as it could. This morning, the sulfur everyone has described took over and the krausen has fallen back into the beer. It's already decently clear and the trub looks like concrete.

Despite the sulfur, I respect this yeast's tenacity.
 
So I figured I'd share my experience so far with this yeast since I was pretty surprised by it. Decided to give it a try per the recommendation of the local homebrew shop...

I am using it for a tripel. Basically all belgian pils malt with a little aromatic and 1lb of candi syrup. Mashed at 149 for 90mins.

(I'm converting all these from Brix on my refractometer)
-I started at 1.074 OG
-Yeast was pitched saturday evening (8/15/15).
-I rehydrated it in some of my second runnings that I saved.
-Fermentation temps ranged from 70-72.
-I took a measurement last night (8/20/15) and it was at 1.006

If my calculations are correct, that's almost 92% attenuation. I was in disbelief and went and checked calibration on my refractometer (it was spot on) and even grabbed my hydrometer to double check. Both showed the same thing.

This is my first Belgian, but I've never had anything attenuate that well. Not sure how it tastes yet since it just went into secondary. I will report back later. I have a feeling it is going to have to sit for a while so it doesn't taste like fusel alcohol...
 
Happy to report that the sample I took today was delicious. No sulfur, bready malt flavor, and a restrained ester profile with some Belgian flavors. The recipe fits the style guidelines for an American Amber Ale and a Belgian Pale Ale, and due to the decidedly Belgian flavor I've taken to calling it the latter. It's in bottles and I can't wait for the finished product. Definitely love this yeast.
 
Beer notes from first time trying Safbrew Abbaye (also first all-grain batch):

09AUG2015 Belgian Single

11lbs Belgian Pilsner malt
0.5lbs US Aromatic
1.5lbs table sugar
2oz Hallertau (3%) (60 min)
1 packet (11.5g) Safbrew Abbaye
0.5 tsp Irish Moss (15 min)
0.5 tsp WLN1000 yeast nutrient (10 min)

Mashed at 145F 1 hour
Batch sparge
Split boil (90 min) 7 gallon
5 gallon batch

Pitched rehydrated packet at ~80F
Ambient temperature: 72F
Peak fermentation temp: ~82F

Original Gravity: 1.060
Final Gravity: 1.002
Apparent Attenuation: 96%
ABV: ~7.6%

10AUG2015: fermenting vigorously, removed bucket lid to allow for open fermentation
12AUG2015: replaced bucket lid
13AUG2015: krausen dropped, racked to secondary. S.G.: 1.004. *extreme* pepper notes. Tastes like someone dumped a shaker of black pepper into beer, with strange "Lucky Charms" aftertaste
23AUG2015: bottled with 3/4 cup table sugar for priming. F.G.: 1.002


29AUG2015: Peppery notes have all but faded, leaving a very clean, pear taste to beer. Still vague peppery aftertaste. Very dry. Pleased with the outcome. Interested to see how beer will change at 30 day bottling mark.
 
I think the dryness of my particular blonde was largely a function of the super low mash and the high fermentation temperatures. If someone took the same recipe and mashed higher and fermented lower, it probably would have come out closer to 1.010.

So far as the peppery/pear notes, well from what I've gathered that's pretty much what most people are reporting.

I'm surprised by the fruity/bubblegum descriptions, I didn't get that at all. I had expected to though. Sounds more like T-58.

The beer was very rough around the edges when I bottled about a week ago. I wasn't sure if it was gonna be drinkable. Even after only a week in the bottles it has smoothed out considerably.
 
Anybody use abbaye and notice a distinct lack of krausen? I have a split batch going right now about 1.5 days post pitch, and my 3787 is rocking a 3 inch krausen, while the abbaye is throwing off a ton of poop odors, lots of airlock activity but almost no krausen. Temp is upper 60's F.
 
When i used this yeast in a Belgian Blonde ( og was 1.085 i think )
it finished at 1.006
I used 2 lbs of homemade belgian candy sugar
and i didn't get really any peppery notes but imho it did have a lot of bananna flavor to it. Too much for my tastes pesonally but others claimed to like it....I think my problem was i first tasted it right after my Marzen keg kicked and tbh i probably wouldn't have liked ANYTHING other than more Marzen at that point in time.
I made a small batch of an all wheat beer to mix with it using german hops and a lower abv to balance things out....haven;t tried the mix yet.......

anywho....rant over.
 
I like this yeast.
Most of my brews are OG~1.065. I use candy sugar, Special B, Carapils and caramunich
The fermentation smells are strong but mostly beery and estery. THe strongest scent is from the carapils impact I think.
The flavours are rich in the final beer and it clears well.
 
Hanso said:
Anybody use abbaye and notice a distinct lack of krausen? I have a split batch going right now about 1.5 days post pitch, and my 3787 is rocking a 3 inch krausen, while the abbaye is throwing off a ton of poop odors, lots of airlock activity but almost no krausen. Temp is upper 60's F.
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I fermented my 5 gallon batch in a 6 gallon carboy and almost ran out of space. Krausen made it to the bottom of the rubber stopper for my (unnecessary) blowoff tube. My temp was low to mid 70s.
 
Hanso said:
Anybody use abbaye and notice a distinct lack of krausen? I have a split batch going right now about 1.5 days post pitch, and my 3787 is rocking a 3 inch krausen, while the abbaye is throwing off a ton of poop odors, lots of airlock activity but almost no krausen. Temp is upper 60's F.
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It's possible you missed the krausen entirely. This one takes off like a rocket. The 3787/530 is a much slower fermenter.
 

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