Priming with wort

[Rick_UK]

Hi Chaps

Just crash cooling my Belgian pale brewed with harvested Chimay yeast which fermented well. It tasted good, lots of estery yeast flavours but if I'm being picky could do with a little more body. In order to achieve this I am considering steeping some pale crystal in a litre of water, boiling for 30 mins and using this to bulk prime before bottling. By using a hydrometer I can measure how much sugar is in the solution but not all of this will be fermentable so I may need to use more or add some sugar also.

Can anyone see a flaw in this plan? I'm sure it will still be a good beer if I just prime with dextrose as usual so am not precious about doing this!

Rick

[Fil]

You wont get as much from crystal as you would from a base malt, you may also need to add enzymes with a handful of malt to enable any conversion.
why not just use dme? iirc the maltmiller is very competitive price wise on DME.

[seymour]

Generally speaking, priming/conditioning a near-finished beer with fresh wort is an excellent technique, that's what the Germans call "krausening" (though they use new wort at the height of fermentation, but I digress...)

However, the main "problem" I see with your suggestion is the desire to insert English body into a Belgian ale, which might be an exercise in futility. That Chimay yeast is so efficient and attenuative it'll ferment-away most anything you throw at it, especially at so late a stage. I'd urge you to resign yourself to a delicious, well-crafted, light-bodied Belgian ale.

I don't mean to sound sarcastic or pessimistic, I'm just saying this is a fundamental difference between the two brewing traditions. The body we enjoy in English ales could be described as those things which inefficient English ale yeast leaves behind.

Perhaps next attempt you can use a dextriny base malt such as Mild Ale or CaraPils instead of regular pale malt, use a higher single-rest mash temperature, and use lots of unmalted adjunct grain: rolled oats, torrified wheat, flaked barley, etc, to intentionally handicap the yeast, same as you'd do with hyper-attenuative Adnams or Ringwood dual-strain yeasts.

[Rick_UK]

Thanks Seymour, intuitive as ever

I took your advice and just bottled as normal. Not used the Chimay strain before and as you say it's highly attenuative and quite phenolic from my small sample! Previously I have used the Trappe yeast and T58 both of which left more sweetness so it may be I just need my palette to grow some!

Its carbing up now, will try a bottle in another week or two.... Hope all is well in Uncle Sam

[seymour]

Thanks Seymour, intuitive as ever ...

Thank you, mate!

...I took your advice and just bottled as normal. Not used the Chimay strain before and as you say it's highly attenuative and quite phenolic from my small sample! Previously I have used the Trappe yeast and T58 both of which left more sweetness...

That all sounds right. I think you'll really enjoy the dry spicy beer, taken for what it is.

...Hope all is well in Uncle Sam...

Sadly no. The senseless white-on-black police brutality rages on. I am ashamed of our current state of "justice".

[BenB]

I've read that the Chimay is a rare example of a beer conditioned using the primary fermentation yeast but the yeast obtained from the bottle will be the alcohol tolerant cells and may give a different taste if then used to ferment from 0% abv. You can also get genetic mutation due to the high alcohol levels causing changes (particularly if the yeast has been sat in the high ABV beer for some time). That may explain some of the taste changes even if the recipe is spot on. Then again, that might be urban myth peddled by Wyeast and White labs

Hope it turns out nice

I was considering Krausening at some point on the basis that I'm not that keen on adding extraneous stuff to beer. At the recent homebrewers meet they were tasting Festive brews and there was kinds of stuff going on in them- sugars, star anise, cinnamon, ginger even bourbon... Now I'm a wee bit old fashioned (I think using hops is a bit "nouveau" ) so at some point I'll try going all German and do a "pure" beer. Then again I reckon the use of acid malt is a bit silly. It seems a lot of hard work to find lactic acid producing bacteria infested malt rather than just using some normal malt and adding lactic acid (even if that breaks the Reinheitsgebot rules). Then again, don't tell anyone but my brew for tomorrow has a little bit of brown sugar in it