Brewing up a Belgian

[matthewdick23]

it's a bonus that I have a friend from belgium who is currently opening a brewery on the east coast-

Errm??, The East Coast of where?

lol, sorry- of america. new jersey. slow going trying to start, but he's almost there

[Bubbles]

The other time I did it in the bottle and I didn't have any bottle bombs despite bottling with 3 volumes of sugar. I'll admit I could have probably mashed higher and the primary fermentation temperatures were a bit on the high side so that the final gravity before bottling wasn't that high. While I can't find links at the moment I think once you are down to single digits on your final gravity and you've got pretty strong bottles you'll be fine.

Did you just pitch the dregs from one bottle into your bottling bucket?

[mr hoppy]

I've drank three or four bottles to get enough brett to make an impression in some sort of reasonable time frame, or should I say that getting the brett is an excuse to drink 3 or 4 bottles of Orval? 

Brett is pretty hardy, os if you don't want to drink all that Orval in one go you can reseal the bottle and leave it in a cold fridge for a couple of weeks until you have enough.

[Bubbles]

Great idea. I like the idea of adding Brett at bottling time more than adding it in secondary. Initially, I'd probably just dose a few bottles as an experiment  - two beers for the price of one.

[mr hoppy]

If you're interested in brett at all check out the mad fermentationist's blog. There's an awful lot of really interesting stuff on there,

[Bubbles]

Oh yeah, he's the king. Love his experiments with the barrel aging and solera beers. And the amount of hops he puts into some of his beers... 

[mr hoppy]

Paddy, I just thought I'd be doing wrong if I didn't say that you need to be more careful than usual with sanitation with brett and preferrably use separate plastic and tubing to non-brett beers. I'm thinking you know that but just for the record.

I love MF, and Burgundian Babble Belt is another great resource. The three books from Brewers Association (Wild Brews, Farmhouse Ales and BLAM) are also really good.

In a funny way though (and maybe slightly off-topic) I think Tim Webb's Good Beer Guide to Belgium or Michael Jackson's Belgian beer book are more inspriational because they aren't straight-jacketed by the BJCP categories which only fully reflect certain aspects of Belgian brewing.