News & Reference

What Do You Do With 60 Pounds Of Dark Candi Syrup?

Homebrewing

The All Grain Brewer   |   Thursday, January 26 2012

BJCP Category 18B :  The Belgian Dubble and why it’s good to be in a home brew club.

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You can tell it is brewing season because the snow is on the ground, the air is cold, and all I’ve been writing about lately is my last brewing adventure. Well, last weekend all three of these things came together again. This time it was a Belgian Dubble, category 18B in the BJCP style guidelines if you want to go read about it. The best commercial example of the style is Westmalle Dubble of which I agree. However, another close competitor is Grimbergen Dubbel. Grimbergen Dubble has one advantage over Westmalle and that is the price. Grimbergen is about $10.00 a six pack, while Westmalle is about $4.50 per bottle because it’s a Trappist Ale. Trappist ales are made by monks at low production levels, therefore the price is higher especially when they make the best example of a beer style in the world.

So what was my recipe? As always I make a 5 gallon batch, and I boil 90 minutes. My brewing system boils off about 1.25 to 1.5 gallons of water in 90 minutes.

• 10.5 lbs Pilsener malt
• 1.0 lbs Munich malt
• 0.5 lbs Special B malt
• 0.5 lbs Aromatic malt
• 0.5 lbs CaraMunich malt
• 1.5 lbs Dark Belgian Candi Syrup – D – 80 SRM (I hope this doesn’t make the beer to dark)

*Note – SRM = standard reference method; which is a scale used to measure a beer's color; the lower the number the lighter the beer. For example SRM of 2 is golden and a SRM of 44 is black. The SRM for a Belgian Dubble is 10 – 14.

• 1.2 ounces of Saaz Hops @ 5.5 alpha acid for 60 minutes
• Irish Moss with 15 minutes remaining in the boil

• Fermenting on a yeast cake of Wyeast 3787 Trappist High Gravity

So I read that when making Belgian Triple (yes I said Belgian Triple – bare with me) it is better if the brewer uses clear Belgian candi syrup instead of clear Belgian rock sugar, so a while back I ordered a pound of clear candi syrup in a big bulk grain order with some of my home brew club buddies. Remember I told you that the home brew club is where you get real bargains, information, feedback, and recipes. Anyway, when the pallet of grain showed up with the couple of extras that I ordered, my buddy who coordinated the bulk buy gave me a call to let me know it had arrived. The first thing he said to me was “I got some good news and some bad news to tell you.” Like most people I never want to hear this statement, so after careful consideration I asked him to tell me the bad news first. He says, “well you didn’t get clear candi syrup, you got dark.” Ok, no big deal, I love Belgian Dubble, so I'll just make that instead. So my friend then says, “now the good news, they sent you 60 pounds of dark syrup!” Of course we tried to return it, but it came on a pallet. So I am now the proud owner of, well now, 58.5 pounds of dark Belgian candi syrup.

Wow, that’s a lot of syrup. I’m pretty sure I do not want to brew that many Belgian Dubbles before the syrup goes bad. One thing I did do to try to preserve the freshness was to take my CO2 tank, and blast CO2 in the syrup container to remove as much air and create a CO2 blanket much like what is done for beer in kegging. So now my home brew club friends have a very cheap / free supply of dark Belgian candi syrup. It’s good to be in a home brew club. I plan on using the syrup for one of my next brews – a Belgian Dark Strong, category 18E in the style guidelines.

I was actually a little scared to work with this syrup because I did not want to try and pour one and half pounds of thick, sticky syrup out of a 60 pound container. I just saw disaster written all over this exercise. Well as it turns out the syrup is thinner than I thought it would be. I still did not pour it out. Instead, I tried to use a ladle, which was too big to get in the container opening, so I painstakingly spooned out one and half pounds of syrup. I took me about 20 minutes, but I made no mess, so it was well worth my time.

The All Grain Brewer Has Spoken