Belgian Blonde

Well ever since I tasted John Little’s Belgian Blonde beer, I was very impressed. This is a style that is quite unique as it looks almost like a light American lager, yet it has an amazing flavor and tastes wonderful. It has a little bit of Belgian funkiness along with a floral type aroma. This beer has a tremendous flavor, yet it does not utilize a lot of hops, making it a great beer to brew during the hop shortage. The other reason why I chose to brew this beer is a great friend of mine, Justin Turner (Pictured on the right), was in Airborne School, and wanted to come up an brew a batch with me and take some back home with him to Florida. This means I had to have it bottled in two weeks before his graduation. He used to brew extract beers with me in Texas, and the best one we did back then was a Hefeweizen that came out great. Since he had been to Belgium since then and had tasted some of the best beers in the world, he was quite excited to try this out.
So, to begin we used the Lefty’s Blonde recipe in Jamil’s book, which interestingly enough calls for cane sugar instead of Belgian Candi sugar. In any case, we brewed it according to the recipe, doubling the ingredients for a 10 gallon batch (I wanted to give Justin some and keep some for myself!).
The original gravity came out at 1.070, and finished at about 1.008.
Initial tasting before carbonation was quite clean with no flaws, and not really much flavor.
This is where it gets interesting. I bottled about a case for Justin, then kegged 5 gallons, and put the rest in a secondary (glass carboy). After force carbonating, it tasted ok, but nothing spectacular. Even after a week, I was not impressed, and felt that maybe the Belgian candi sugar John suggested was the missing ingredient. Another interesting point is it left your mouth with some alcohol warmth in the aftertaste. Usually this is caused by initial high fermentation, but I started at 64 degrees, and let it rise to 68 over the course of the first week. After the second week, it was about 1.012, and I cranked it up to about 78F (like Leffe apparently does) to finish the beer.

So after a little over two weeks in the keg, it tasted the same, yet in 3 days, the bland flavor bloomed like a flower into a sweet floral flavor. This beer obviously has to have some cold aging (as mentioned in Jamil’s book– 4 weeks) to reach its flavor. So now I finally have the beer I wanted in the beginning!

Filed under: Brew Log