Doing an all grain Dubbel, need Ideas to make it different.

A touch of cinnamon at the end of the boil, aged on cherries (sour cherries are best, but really hard to find), makes a nice twist on a dubbel.

 

Age the beer on raisins. I read about doing this in a book on barley wine and it has always sounded appealing to me but I have yet to get around to it. It is supposed to add a dark fruit flavor to the beer.

 

I'd go with raisins as well. I've had a couple Quads with them but no Dubbels.

 

They taste good tho.......I tried to clone baby tree by putting some dried plums in the boil, I believe thats the way Pretty things does their baby tree. I would try 12 oz, last 15 min of the boil. ( cut up )

 

Dried mission figs are tasty as well...you wanna do something easy and cheap, you could look into making your own candy sugar syrup, that is, unless you've already got sugar in the recipe; I've done this, w/the instructions from basicbrewing's podcast (online) and it turned out great; you'll have to look for the episode, but it teaches you how to make like 5 dift. colors/grades. I used a really dark one in a Quad and it dried it out quite nicely and gave some awesome dark fruit flavors. All you need is water, diammonium phosphate (any brewing store's likely to have it, it's a type of yeast nutrient) and plain ol table sugar!

 

pretty things actually uses prunes (aka dried plums) at the end of the boil. chop em up for the best results (i'm guessing), strain the wort to keep out the solids. if you go this route, try to find some sorbate free prunes. fresh plums might be interesting...I'd actually suggest putting them through a juicer, and adding the fresh juice to the ferment (vs boiling/setting the pectin, needing pectin enzyme, etc.) to retain the most of that acidity/fresh character and since you are only doing 1 gallon, not lose too much beer to the fruit. good luck!

 

trouble w/ straining in the amount of oxygen you would add. once the plums are sitting in there beer, the pulp of the flesh will just be a big slurry, probably lose 1/3 to 1/2 of the beer. You'd need some very specialized equipment to properly separate without adding oxygen...hence my suggestion for juicing, adding the juice after primary ferment is done.

 

For one of my more recent dubbels, I made a raisin and currant syrup using some recipe or other for raisin syrup that I found online. The beer was OK but the recipe was a bit of a trainwreck -- too many specialty ingredients. It also had home toasted malt, homemade candi sugar (somewhat burnt), two different caramunichs, and special B. If I rebrewed it, I would make the recipe much simpler to better understand what if anything the fruit syrup added.

 

herbs. use herbs.
cardamom, cinnamon, thyme, orange peel, etc

 

Chopped dates.