Trappist High Gravity, Sour Mashes, Partigyles.........Beer is way to much fun!

Since the last post I've added the Trappist High Gravity (Wyeast 3787) to the stable.  My brewclub got this yeast to use for a Belgian partigyle that we did a couple of weeks ago.  The partigyle was an interesting affair that was a adaptation of a standard partigyle (many thanks to Scott for all his hard work on figuring this out).  We didn't want a big beer and a small beer, instead we wanted 3 beers of good or strong gravity.  We used two separate mash tuns each to produce a strong wort.  Then we sparged a second running out of each mash tun with about half the volume we would have for a normal beer.  We combined these two second runnings together to create the wort for the third beer.  The result was that we created a Quadrupel, Tripel, and Dubel all in one session.  For an added bonus we sourmashed our leftover grains for 24 hours and were able to produce two sour beers of reasonable gravity as well!  (I added sour cherry juice to mine in the fermenter and it is tasting fantastic so far)

The Trappist High Gravity has done a great job fermenting out the Quadrupel and has handled the multiple "Candi" syrup additions (Listen to the Homade Candi Syrup episode on Basic Brewing Radio to learn how to make this) very well.  The beer is a wonderfully malty, complex big beer.  It doesn't have as much of the "Belgian" character from the yeast as I was hoping for but I don't have temperature control for my carboys yet and it fermented around 66-68 F which is lower than what I would have liked to ferment it at.  Even so it is shaping up to be a great beer.

This evening I created a 50 ml starter and picked off a colony of the Trappist High Gravity to toss in.  This should be going into a friend's Patersbier next weekend.  Can't wait to see how that comes out.

I'm planning an American IPA next weekend which is a little bit different from what I usually brew so I'm looking forward to that.  Lots of Amarillo and Simcoe hops and lots of late additions!  I'm picking up a package of Wyeast 1056 which seems like a fitting yeast for this type of IPA.  I haven't brewed with this one in years but will be sure to snag a sample to go into the stable so it can work it's way into the rotation.

Pretty soon I'm going to need to make up some more plates and slants!