Baby girl Belgian honey ale

I took this past Friday off from work to brew a celebratory beer for my daughter’s impending birth (due Valentine’s Day). Doesn’t get much better than outdoor brewing on a fall Friday afternoon.

I’ve received a lot of positive feedback on the Belgian golden honey ale I brewed last February, in competition as well as from friends, so I figured I’d stick with a tasty recipe for this important batch – with one important tweak: it needed to be red for Valentine’s Day so I switched up the specialty malt bill to make it more like the red lager I brewed in 2010.

Here’s the recipe:

Base: 9 lbs. domestic 2-row, 4 lbs. malted white wheat
Specialty: 14 oz. carmel 40L, 8 oz. carapils, 3 oz. de-bittered black
Other fermentables: 2.5 cups light DME (20″), amber Candi sugar (18″), 2 lbs. clover honey (15″), 0.25 oz. bitter orange and 0.25 oz. whole coriander (5″)
Hops: 1 oz. Liberty pellets (75″), 1 oz. Liberty pellets (65″), 1 oz. whole leaf Fuggle (5″), 1 oz. whole leaf Fuggle (2″)
Yeast: White Labs WLP550 Belgian Ale (1600 ml yeast starter, 1 c light DME)
1/2 tbsp. Irish moss (15″), 1/2 tbsp. pre-hydrated yeast nutrient (10″)
OG: 1.072

The batch is fermenting away happily at 74* about two days after pitch. Lucky I used blowoff tubing, because I had to go play a show with my band after I cleaned up from brewing. When I got home the next morning, krausen had made it’s way into the tubing’s receptacle bucket. Had I just had a normal airlock on there, I would have come home to an explosive scene much like I experienced last February with my S.O.B. saison batch.