Aqua Vitae

This recipe is from the book Clone Brews and is intended as a clone of Duvel, the classic, best-selling golden ale from Belgium. In my case, it will not be so much a Duvel-clone, as a Duvel-inspired brew. I

The biggest ingredient change was in the yeast that I used. The recipe called for reculturing yeast from a bottle of Duvel, a project that I didn’t really want to undertake. Instead I used a yeast recommended in a different golden ale recipe, Wyeast 1214. I only remembered later that How To Brew Like A Monk has a list of Wyeast (and White Labs) yeasts and which Belgian brewer they correspond to. Wyeast 1214 is the Chimay yeast, while 1388 is their Duvel yeast (White Labs has a Duvel yeast too). If I’d known this when deciding which yeast to use, I would have gone with 1388. But I’m also not disappointed to have gone with a different yeast.

Ingredients:
.5 lb. 2.5L German Light Crystal Malt
4 oz. Belgian Aromatic Malt
3.25 lb. Belgian 2-row Pilsner Malt
4 lb. Munton’s Extra Light Dry Malt Extract
1 lb. Belgian Candi Sugar
2.33 lbs. corn sugar
3 oz. Styrian Goldings
.5 oz. Czech Saaz
1 tsp. Irish moss

Pre-brew: Made a yeast starter by boiling 1 cup of water and .5 cup of dry malt extract. Cooled to 70 degrees and pitched the yeast. Allowed this to rest/ferment for 24 hours.
1. Prep: Boiled and chilled 4 gallons of water. Cleaned and sanitized 2 5-gallon buckets. Had 10 pounds of ice in the freezer, plus a bunch of frozen water bottles, for cooling.

2. Mash: Brought 1.5 gallons of water up to 170 degrees and threw in all of the grains. Let them steep for 90 minutes between 150-160 (shooting for 150 in general). Sparged with 1 gallon of 170 degree water. Nearly 5 pounds of grain was too difficult to sparge using a strainer. This process indicated that a mash tun would really be the best route to go.

3. Wort: Brought the wort to a boil, and then off heat added in the dry malt extract, some of the Styrian Goldings hops, the pound of candi sugar and pound of corn sugar. Returned the wort to the stove and brought it back to a boil. Let it boil for 45 minutes and then added the remaining Styrian Goldings and the Irish moss. With 3 minutes remaining in the boil added the Saaz hops.

4. Cooling: Placed the wort pot into a water bath of cold water chilled with ice, submerged the wort whiller and began running cold water through it. It took 10-12 minutes to cool the wort to ~85 degrees. Added 2 gallons of cold water, and then continued adding cold water to reach a target gravity of 1.082. Pitched the yeast starter and aerated the wort by pouring the wort back and forth between two 5 gallon buckets. After aerating put the wort into the primary fermenter and lidded it.

5. Primary Fermentation: Primary fermentation hummed along for 5 days. It took about 18 hours for fermentation to really get rolling and bubbles to start popping out of the airlock. Once fermentation had subsided to about 1 bubble per minute or two I decided to transfer to secondary.

6. Secondary Fermentation: Boiled 1 lb. of corn sugar in a pint of water and added this to the secondary fermentation vessel (5 gallon carboy). Then transferred the wort/beer to the carboy. The SG was 1.15 (3.8 Plato), a pretty great apparent attenuation percentage.

7. Bottling: After 10 days of secondary fermentation I bottled the golden ale. It came through pretty clear, and had a nice aroma and flavor. Now awaiting several (5?) weeks of maturing before giving it a taste.

8. First Taste: Couldn’t resist, after only 5 days in the bottle I took a bottle to Pete’s house for an initial tasting. Very promising impression. Strong syrupy fruit flavors, poached pears, apricots, orange/Grand Marnier. Only a smattering of carbonation. Now I’ll definitely have to wait at least 4 weeks for a second try. It’s going to be hard though.