Leffe Blonde

[broadfordbrewer]

Hi,

I'm still new to homebrewing and have only brewed 3 kits to date... I'm still not ready to step over to the dark side yet, but would really love to brew something (from kit) that would be close to a Leffe Blonde. I know it would be difficult to acheive the 6.6% abv, but if anyone knows of something similar to this beer, I'd be interedted to hear about it. Failing this... I'd like to do a good quality lager kit... any recommendations on this? Has anyone tried the Brewferm Wheat Belgian Homebrew Beer Kit 5.0% Abv?

Thanks as always.
Dave

 

[Mephistopholes]

I think Brupaks do a "beers of the world" series of beers which ive heard are very good. I think however they are not the kind of cans to be diluted with sugar and water. one can costs £10-15 and produces 10L of finished beer.

You could always buy some powdered belgian yeast a couple of cans of light spray malt and leave some hops out till they go all funky and yellow then boil these in. leaves a bit more room for experimentation and more money in your pocket.

 

[broadfordbrewer]

Hi, thanks for the advice. I'll take a look a the brupaks range. The Brewferm look the same kind of quality.. about £12-16 per kit, to make 2 gallons. This is more what I had in mind anyway... make less but get something a little different to a 5 gallon starter kit...

You could always buy some powdered belgian yeast a couple of cans of light spray malt and leave some hops out till they go all funky and yellow then boil these in. leaves a bit more room for experimentation and more money in your pocket.

This interests me, but I'm not sure I understand how to go about this. Have you mentioned everything that I'd need above? also, what exactly do you mean by boiling in. Would I boil the hops in a set amount of water (for how long?) and then just add the contents to the fv along with the spraymalt and a quantity of cold water, before I pitched the belgian yeast?

 

[Mephistopholes]

ideally it would be best to procede thus.

-open cans of light malt, or powdered spray malt if you like and mix them into 16-20L of water (depending how strong you want your brew, how much beer you want too)

-Bring the full lot to a rolling boil and put 25g(ish) of some hops in

-after 60 mins put more hops in (these are flavour and aroma hops so feel free to throw as many in as you like)

- cool the whole thing down to 18-24 c, then pitch your funky packet of dried belgian beasties

However

if you dont have suitable equpiment to boil vigourously 16-20 litres of liquid

-make up as large a soloution of wort (water and extract) as you can fit into your largest pan

-boil your first hops in this (bittering hops)

-add the aroma hops again after an hour

strain this into the rest of the cool wort mixturehopefully bringing the combbined temparature back within a nice safe yeast pitching range and fire in those belgian baddies.

 

[broadfordbrewer]

This is great thank you. :thumb:
Can I be a pain and ask you to suggest which hops would be good to use? and is it obvious which belgian yeast to buy?

 

[Mephistopholes]

Check out charles farhams website. they have a huge list of hops and descriptions of each. you can't buy hops from here but its a useful place to read about them. the malt miller (an online shop) sells quite a few of these hops though in much smaller and affordable quantities.
With regards to yeast i think s33 is a decent dry belgian yeast. themalt miller sells a wheat beer yeast for £1.20 which might be intresting to try on some pale malt with no yeast, it'll definately belgify it. alternatively you can buy one of those wet yeast jobs from wyeast who have a huge array of different belgian yeasts for around six quid on ebay or amazon or even quite a few of the online homebrew shops.
It might be worth just googling leffe clone to see what you get too.

Good luck with your first steps towards you know where.

 

[kentish dave]

I wonder if a bit of el cheapo kit bashing would be in order? how close a match do you want? Belgian beers are high in alcohol owing to added sugar, I'm thinking of a pale beer kit, easy on the hops, added sugar and, of course, belgian abbey yeast.

 

[Mephistopholes]

That'll work. it will probably save on boiling the hops too as i think they already have some hop bitterness boiled in for you. it really is all about either shortening the brewlength/adding extra sugar and blazing in that bad boy belgian yeast.