Best of Show Winning Belgian Dark Strong Ale Recipe

[@Vykk_Draygo]

Love the age curve, very telling!

[@jasontheworldisyours]

Delicious drink

[@jaggersbrewingco]

Nice video! I wish this would of been out before I brewed mine. I also racked mine on to a yeast cake for the Dubbel I had brewed.

[@IDillon0]

Great Video; I hope you eventually have a video like this for every category.

[@MeanBrews]

thats the plan! Except things like Fruit beer or wood aged beer. Can't really draw conclusions from those.

[@kaiser_sose]

Hi Matthew! Since I found you're channel a few weeks ago, I'm hooked. I'm trying to brew your BDS, but am struggling with the water chemistry. When I plug you numbers into bru'n water, my results are way off! Can you expand on how you calculated you're additions?

[@MeanBrews]

My advice would be to just try to hit the sulfate/chloride numbers. Don't really worry about the others (unless they're crazy high). You'll get some Epsom salt in your nutrient addition and depending on the water used to sprout the grains, you'll pick up enough calcium to prevent scale buildup.

[@jgould21]

I brewed this beer back in late 2020... Hit a bit higher efficiency and attenuated a bit lower... It hit 11.7%... We'll see how it ages!

[@MeanBrews]

And its scoring higher at a young age than my beer did.

[@jgould21]

@@MeanBrews I might rebrew this once I'm moved in and brewing again... Might even get a barrel aged version going, if I can get my hands on a decent barrel

[@jgould21]

Correction... I brewed the Mean Brews recipe... We'll wait until a later date for that recipe.... Haha

[@agustinfernandez6279]

Hi my friend. I have a question please. 78*F during 7 days is a maturation fhase, isn't it? After that you do cold crash, finings, etc and then aging, don't you? Many thanks.

[@MeanBrews]

Yes

[@johncrawford8317]

Congrats on the Best in Show and thanks for the recipe! What temperature do you store your bottles at? I’m also in Texas and my options seem to be ~73F room temperature or in the fridge. It’s so interesting to see the clear uptrend in the beer’s scoring over time.

[@MeanBrews]

I store at RT and it works well. I recommend using Brewtan B if storing at this temperature.

[@Vykk_Draygo]

@@MeanBrews My wife keeps the house around 78-80... I should probably invest in some Brewtan B.

[@suwirwong]

What brand of malt is your favorite?

[@MeanBrews]

For this beer dingemans

[@DavidTowles]

How did the last three competitions do?

[@MeanBrews]

I think it got 2 more medals

[@renato7118]

Did tou make candy sugar ? Here in Brazil its expensive belgian candy sugar...

[@MeanBrews]

no I did not make the candi sugar.

[@mattsawdy9747]

Did you bottle condition or bulk condition Nice job on the BOS. 👌

[@MeanBrews]

Bottle condition and thanks!

[@mattsawdy9747]

@@MeanBrews what do you think about bulk conditioning. Would it be a better or faster why to condition special beers

[@egruber50]

Did you take a beer PH reading after it was bottled? Just curious where that went from mash PH of 5.48. I track my beer PH after packaging in order understand where the final beer PH level ends up. That lets me know if my process is consistent when I brew the same styles over time.

[@MeanBrews]

Rarely do I take a post fermentation pH, only when the beer seems "off" or I'm brewing a sour beer. If I owned a commercial brewery I'd probably be more consistent and thorough in measureents but as a homebrewer, i can't be bothered so long as it tastes alright. I do tweak my meads quite regularly after fermentation is done. I think this is essential to making award winning mead.

[@canadianJaouk]

Congrats! I though I saw you there! I entered saison and got silver. If you'd like the recipe for your data set, let me know.

[@MeanBrews]

Congrats to you as well! Sure I'll take your recipe! [e-mail]

[@skroz1]

FWIW, I loaded your BrewFather recipe into BeerSmith and it shows 39.6 IBU with Tinseth. *shrug*

[@MeanBrews]

I wonder if my beersmith settings are off...

[@MeanBrews]

btw I found 4 more IBUs from beersmith. I had inadventantly set the sugar additions to be added at the start of the boil vs at the end. This affected isomerization efficiency to the tune of 4 more ibus.

[@skroz1]

​@@MeanBrews Ah! That makes sense. When I imported from BF into BS the sugars were indeed added at the end.