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Stone's Vertical Epic 090909
I just had my first bottle of this last night, and I just ordered all the ingredients to replicate it today! It was that good. They admit the orange does not come out that much, and I will agree, so I am going to put 3 oranges of peel into the last 10 minutes of boil. This is a BIG one, kind of a spiced imperial Belgian porter. I took the percentages off of their website, and derived this recipe to within a tolerance to keep all the ingredients in easily measurable amounts. It should be within 1/2% of theirs. I also subbed in 1/2 # of special b by removing it from the c-80. This is what I came up with.
15 gallon boil
13 gallon batch
80% mash efficiency
OG - 1.080 20P
FG - 1.020 5P
50 IBUs
47 SRM
7.7% ABV
26# Thomas Fawcett Halcyon (73.2%)
3# American C-80 (8.5%)
.5# special B (1.4%)
2# british chocolate (5.6%)
2# belgian aromatic (5.6%)
.5# black patent (1.4%)
.5# dehusked carafa II (1.4%)
1# Belgian cadi syrup D2 (2.8%)
Wyeast 3522 Ardennes strain ferment @ 72
Peels of 3 oranges 10 min from knockout
1 vanilla bean sliced, scraped added to secondary
2 oz medium toast french oak secondary 3 weeks.
I am lucky enough to have 2 fermenters of belg blond on this same yeast that should be done fermenting this weekend, so I will brew this next friday and pitch right onto the cakes of each. There is a lot of crystal in this one, and stone recommends a mash temp of 150 to make this fermentable, so I am going with that. There is a lot of nice advice in their description of this recipe here http://www.stonebrew.com/epic/Wc6297b16717fd.htm
Very very interesting brew. What was your take on the taste of the bottle? I am really intrigued by this and am seriously considering putting this into my cycle of brews in the very near future. It is after all, heading towards the porter time of year...
Hey Thirsty - Be careful with pitching right onto a yeast cake; not because of a chance of infection. I'm sure you've done this before with great success. In reality you are likely over pitching, even at OG 1.080, by a rate of 10-100 times more yeast than you actually need, especially with a Belgian yeast strain that typically has higher alcohol tolerance anyway. I tried this technique with WLP530 (Belgian Ale yeast) and was not all that happy with the outcome. I think the major problem with pitching on the yeast cake, resulting in an over pitch, is that the Belgian yeast do not have the chance to really imbue their character into the beer before the fermentation is done. Also, at such high numbers of yeast they are way more stressed out that you would think because the yeast can actually sense the density (cells/ml of wort) of yeast in their environment. Too high a density and the yeast start to throw off off-flavors. Next time we're brewing together (or the next time I actually make it to a MA brew event), I'll bring a bottle of a Belgian Dark Strong I made using this method to show you what I mean by under par results (not an infection either)... Anyway, just thought I'd throw that idea out there, but I'm sure you'll pull through with a great beer either way. Cheers!
That makes a ton of sense. I have read of actually slightly underpitchung belgian strains to make them work harder and developing more character. My fear of this is my past experience. Even making a highly fermentable wort, my tripels and dubbels have been stalling on me, my last dubbel I had to pitch some t-58 to dry out, it stalled at .025 on me, and my last tripel is kegged and carbed now, but is also too sweet.
I wholeheartedly believe in proper pitch count, it is just so hard to measure! If you take a slurry in a mason jar, and you need 400 billion cells for a HG wort, what does that look like? How do you know you are even in the ballpark? If I take a cake of this yeast I want to pitch next week, wash it, and split it into 2 and pitch into 2 fermenters am I back on the money, or still overpitching?
Yeah, these are all great questions. Unfortunately, the only way to truly know your cell counts is to actually count them under a microscope using a hemocytometer. I think that even how 400 billion cells looks in a mason jar would change depending on the yeast strain you're looking at because the size of individual cells can vary greatly. I guess the only way to estimate the cell density in a yeast cake after a fermentation is to say that during a fermentation the yeast divide roughly 5-6 times. So, if you initially pitched 100 billion cells you would likely have between 3.2 trillion and 6.4 trillion cells in the cake after fermentation. So, if you only needed 400 billion cells to pitch into the next batch, then you should be using 1/8 the total volume of yeast cake to pitch. Obviously, take this with a grain of salt. I'm just throwing out my thoughts on this subject and have in no way actually tested my theory. The total number of divisions occurring in a fermentation greatly depends on the health of the fermentation, so the 1/8th yeast cake thing could be off by a factor of 4 or more if the yeast weren't happy in the 1st fermentation.
I'm certainly not going to try the pitching on a yeast cake thing again anytime soon. I can grow my yeast at work to my required density too easily to worry about reusing what's in the fermenter. Is there no way you can build up a good sized starter from a vial or two in time for the brew?
Also, as for your Belgians not attenuating to your liking, have you tried to do a forced fermentation do see what the actual terminal gravity should be? Also, as I'm sure you know, a good way to ensure your Belgians dry out is to use 10-15% sugar in the grain bill. The last Belgian I did dropped from 1.055 to 1.003. Man, did that one turn out nice! I still have 5 gal aging on top of 8lbs chopped mango right now. Can't wait to keg that one up! 
Thirsty, i'm pretty sure this recipe doesn't have Special B in it. What the hell is it with you and special B? Leave it alone, just step away from the malt bin. Did you accidently buy 50 lbs of special B instead of base malt? What the hell man. Ha ha
You know that shampoo commercial with Troy Palamalu (sp?) where he says Isnt it?...Isnt't it..., really isnt it?...That's how I feel about special B. Its in all recipes isnt it? Isn't it?
Seriously if the recipe even hints at dark crystal, I need to include it somehow, subbing, bumping, whatever, I love the fruits it brings out, and in moderation it is the perfect complement. Like salt and peppering your food.
My name is thirsty and I am a Special B addict. There is that what you were looking for Lauren?
Ha ha, I'll let your special B addiction go as I know it must be killing you that brewchez is now a brewing legend. It's tough to argue with the title, but I hope his head doesn't get to big, Ha ha.
The only time I pitched on a yeast cake, I got lots of acetaldehyde flavors that took about 4 months to go away. I think there was so much yeast in there, they got lazy and didn't clean up after themselves.
That was also just a ~1.060 beer, and it did eventually go away.
bruguru wrote:
Ha ha, I'll let your special B addiction go as I know it must be killing you that brewchez is now a brewing legend. It's tough to argue with the title, but I hope his head doesn't get to big, Ha ha.
I guess I should start brewing beer more often if I am a brewing legend.
Its going to be tough with a second child on the way in February.
Might have to go back to extract brewing just for the time savings.
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