A Wee Tale

As Brother RD mentioned, Brother D and I have a story to tell. We have been brewing for about 7-8 years, if I am remembering correctly with a stint of 4 years in that where we brewed a batch a week. We have tried about every type of recipe you can imagine and even have a few ribbons under our belt in competition.

About 4 years ago the owner of our local brew shop, CBS (http://www.brewbeer.cc/), had a recipe for a Wee Heavy. These robust recipes are not for the faint of heart as the result can drop you in the 15% range of ABV and that is not an easy feet. But here we are, cocky as all get out, loving all of the different types of stuff we had been able to pull off so why not a Wee Heavy?

Brewing was pretty straightforward although we used extracts to increase the gravity since doing it with a boil would have taken us 2 days. We carboyed the sucker, added the first round of High Gravity yeast, then added Champagne yeast (works in high alc) two weeks later and then waited.

It was very active but died out in about 3 weeks. We thought this was a bit unusual considering the amount of sugars involved so we racked it to secondary fermentation and it took off again for a shorter 2 weeks. Time for a taste and a measurement to see how it was coming along.

It was still way off of the mark and still was very sweet so I think we re-racked it for the third time and waited.

The first sign of trouble was the waft of stinky sock we got off of it at about the 4-5 month timeframe. You could taste that, in spite of our cleanliness, we had caught a bacteria of some sort. We slipped it into the back of the closet to deal with another day.

At the 9 month mark, we pulled it out again with all the intention of dumping the spoiled batch but the bacterial taste had subsided a bit and we made the decision to allow it to remain in the closet and added a bit of yeast nutrient with a vague hope of recovering something from this batch.

At 1 year and 9 months we sample again. Again the sour has faded but the gravity is still fairly high making the beverage too sweet. We re-racked again, aerated for about a month and then lost interest again as the carboy disappeared back into the depths of the closet.

A year and a half passes with not much brewing, things change, seasons come and go and eventually Brother D and I get the itch to put on another brew. The discussion of what to do with the Wee Heavy is brief and inconclusive until the next week while we are racking to secondary for the batch we just brewed.

We prepare ourselves for the worst as we drag the old beleaguered carboy out of the depths of the closet and make a measurement that we are finally satisfied with and... it tastes wonderful. Almost 3 and one half years later is the thickest, toastiest, sweetest thing we have ever produced. No hint of the bacterial leavings was present and we calculated the ABV at approximately 15% though things get fiddly at that level.

We will never be able to replicate this one again, but it will live on in legend.