I’m in an Iron Brewer style competition this weekend. I’ll be given 5 gallons of wort made from only pils malt. I won’t know the gravity until I get home and take a reading, but I estimated what I’ll have based on my slotted pick up time and previous years info. I may use no more than 2lbs of fermentables (base malt, sugar, etc), but am allowed to use as much specialty grains, fruit, spices, yeast, bugs, hops, etc as I want. My teammate wants to use this crazy fruit called Buddha’s Hand. It’s suppose to be like a lemon, but with a denser inside. I’ve read it’s basically good for it’s zest which can be much stronger than a lemon. Sooooo… our idea is called Belgian Buddha. It’s a citrusy belgian pale ale. Thoughts? Criticisms? Anyone ever eaten, tasted, or used this fruit before?
I’d say instead of cane sugar, use Belgian candi sugar. Yeah, it’s $5 - $6 per pound, but comes in various levels of carmelization, and will give it the zest you need. I figure if you plan to use sugar, use candi sugar. My Begian ale doesn’t use any sugar, but uses Special B malt.
I don’t want to add color from sugar because I’m already getting it from the crystal and it wouldn’t be fitting for a pale ale. I’d only use belgian candi sugar if I were making a Dubbel or something like that. And clear belgian candi sugar is a waste of money. It’s no different than basic table sugar. I use cane because I can get a 4lb bag of organic cane sugar relatively cheap at BJs.
I use Special B in my Dubbel along with D2 syrup. Came out great! But not in a pale ale.
Since we’ll already have the pils as wort and need to mash, we decided to add some Gold Promise. We are also cutting the crystal back just a hair and adding touch of honey malt. Hoping the pils is mashed low… that along with the sugar should help dry it out, but the honey malt should lend just a little sweetness to the end product. Thinking only 4oz of honey malt.
My LHBS had no admiral or amarillo :x , so I picked up an oz of a new hop called Mosaic.
Description: Also known as HBC369, Mosaic is the first born child of Simcoe. Some have described it as Citra on steroids, but it’s much more than that. Rich in Mango, lemon, citrus, earthy pine, tropical fruit, herbal and stone fruit notes.
May also toss in a little centennial. So it will be Cascade, Centennial, and Mosaic. 1oz each, blended and a little added at 60,20,10,1 and a dry hop if needed (which of course it will be) .
Brewed this 2 weeks ago. We were able to score 11gals of wort instead of 5. So in the end we had two 5gal batches. One fermented with Westmalle straight from Iron Hill Brewery and the other with Wyeast Belgian Strong Ale (1388). We’re going to chop up a Buddha Hand and add a bunch to one fermentor and just add some zest to the other. Here’s our final recipe.
74% Pils
11% Golden Promise
6% C40
6% Carapils
3% Honey Malt
1% C120
1lb of cane sugar added to each fermentor after 3 days of active fermentation.
Same hop schedule as above, but doubled since the batch size doubled.
