Homebrewing - When in doubt, Dubbel it - Belgian Dubbel

Today, after a few hours of uni work, got a call from Melo telling me to come over to his to help rack our IPA into the secondary. Upon arriving, I realised he'd lured me there under false presenses... An hour later, our fifth brew was underway. 

First step: weighing out the grains. Melo spent hours designing a grain profile for this beer, so the recipe's staying a little mysterious for now. Just know that we used 3 specialty grains, 2 hops and one BIG pot to boil them all up in

Super secret grain additions

What would brew day be without liquid inspiration?

Next step was putting all the grains in the grain-bag, and steeping at a whole range of different temperatures, each different temperature setting off a whole new set of enzymes to work their magic on our wort

Grains are a go! Not too much in this brew, it's fairly light

World's most ghetto brew stand. It held though!

After nearly 90 minutes of steeping, we started the boil, throwing in a whole load of bittering hops early, then finishing the boil with the tiniest little pinch of aroma hops, for the spicy, fruity, awesomeness known as hop aroma

Mysterious Hops (All 34g of them)

While this whole boiling business was going on, we racked the Trans-Pacific IPA into our new Secondary, which is basically just a giant bucket with some holes drilled in it

Look at that colour!

After the boil, we dunked it in the world's most jury-rigged bucket for a cold crash, cooling it down as fast as possible to stop the aromatic oils from the hops from evaporating

Ice Ice Baby

Finally, the cooled wort went into our freshly cleaned fermenter, taking over the space recently evacuated by our IPA. The Trappist Ale yeast was pitched in and stirred up, then the fermenter was sealed and swaddled up.

On the left, the Dubbel, on the right the IPA. Who's more fashionable?

Now they're both sitting, bubbling away, fermenting into the golden goodness we call beer. IPA should be nearly finished, we'll be dry hopping it on the weekend, and looking to bottle on Tuesday. The Dubbel will probably take 1-3 weeks in the primary, depending on how the weather is, as the room it's in is fairly temperature sensitive.

We have big plans for the Dubbel, specifically additives in the secondaries, so stay tuned to see what we do next!