Castelain Blond Biere De Garde

Never brewed a Biere de Garde, but there is a long section in Farmhouse Ales, great book, well worth the price http://www.amazon.com/Farmhouse-Ales-Culture-Craftsmanship-Tradition/dp/0937381845

 

Biere de Garde is a feeling. Read Farmhouse Ales, and chase the dream.

I've had good luck with an initial pitch of wlp072, add 3711/MJ Belgian after a day, ferment cool, and then adding Brett C at bottling. Mash low. Go light on crystal and add sugar. Fuggles all the way. I can garauntee this is not how Castelain does it, but its made things I've enjoyed.

 

In general, use Euro ingredients. Shoot for some complexity in the grist. Streiselspalt is a commonly used hop. Attenuation should be medium to high. Yeast flavors low. Historically brewed with an ale yeast at cool fermentation temps. Modern companies including Castelain brew with lager yeast at slightly warm temps. Attenuation seems to be moderate-high. Beer is "kept," i.e., garded, i.e., lagered.

According to Farmhouse Ales:
The brewery uses sugar in the fermentation, a lager yeast at an elevated temperature of 57 F and lagers for 6 weeks at 32 F. There is a slightly more detailed description of St Amand Country Ale, which I gather is an amber or dark biere de garde: 1.055, pils, munich, caramel, aromatic, magnum, streiselspalt, saaz.
Tasting notes include touch of wood, licorice, cork, vanilla, with sugary sweetness. I suppose the cork could be responsible for wood, vanilla (?) and cork taste, and steiselspalt sometimes gets described as licorice.

Mind you, I have never had an authentic commercial version of this style...
For the grist, I'd probably do 75% pils, 15-20% munich, with aromatic and a light cara-type malt making up the balance. Given that this is the blond and has a bit of a sugary taste, I'd lean towards the cara malt here. I have found a candy-like sweetness in Belgian Cara20 malt, which might do well. I'd build this grist to be reach 1.045 to 1.050 OG and add enough white sugar to bring to 1.055. For hops, I'd shoot for 20 ibus. I'd skip magnum and get the ibus from 60 and 20 min additions of a streiselpalt and saaz, with about one quarter of the hops coming in at the 20 min mark. If going the lager route, yeast choice may not be all the important. I might even choose a dry yeast for convenience. S-23 is an interesting dry yeast in that seems to yield results that have some ale-ish qualities in my experience, which might work well for the style. If you prefer an ale yeast, maybe Wyeast or White Labs European Ale yeast would be a good choice. I used a blend of WY1338 and US-05 in my only attempt to make this style to hedge my bets between malty flavor and decent attenuation (it achieved 85%, but there were simple sugars in my grist).

Well, that was fun, but didn't cure my insomnia. Interested in knowing how I would tackle a wee heavy?

 

Good luck with the BDG. It's a style that doesn't get brewed much, has pretty loose guidelines (or had - I haven't looked at the 2015 section on it, understated hop and yeast flavors, and for those reasons, I'm guessing for most homebrewers it is unfamiliar. You won't have a shortage of input when you are ready to do the wee heavy.