Patersbier on Memorial Day
I've been planing on doing a Patersbier and a Belgian Dark Strong for a while. A duality of beers kind of thing. I had some free time this Memorial Day and decided to do the easier beer first. There was no Memorial Day significance the time just fit.
I started with the Northern Brewer Patersbier extract kit and that was all I was planing on using until "I made a huge mistake".
.5 oz German Tradition Hops (60 min)
1 oz Saaz Hops (.5 60 min .5 10 min)
Wyeast 3787 Trappist High Gravity yeast
Since this was a dry run of a sort for my Belgian Dark Strong (aka quad) I used some extra steps that I wouldn't normally use
treated the CaraPils as if it needed to be mashed.by trying to get my kettle to hold 160 which wasn't that easy,
Used a large strainer bag instead of a muslin bag
Used a hop bag instead of just throwing it in.
Every thing was going fine until it came time to chill the wort. Some how I massively misjudged how much wort there was. I thought I was under 5.5 gallons so I topped off in the kettle and added a little extra to account for the displacement of the chiller.
It turns out I ended up with an extra 1.5 gallons of wort. What I should have done was to put the wort back in the kettle and boil it until I got back down to about five gallons but I didn't think about that until after the yeast was pitched. What I did instead was add a pound of golden belgian candi syrup that I happen to have for my aforementioned quad.
Since a lot of the flavor of this beer comes from the yeast and the candi syrup tastes awesome I'm still pretty optimistic about the beer. It's still going to come in light at around 4.2% but it could be just the thing for a hot summer day.
A day later and the fermentation is going crazy. Added some fermcap-s (food grade silicone) to cut down the krausen. The last thing I need is a bucket explosion.