Belgian Hoppy Blonde (BE-256)

About This Beer

Brewed on 23 July 2026 — currently fermenting. OG came in at 1.071 with about 24 litres into the fermenter, both comfortably over target. Two packets of BE-256 pitched at 24°C. By day three (26 July) the beer was down to 1.017 and the Simcoe and Celeia dry hop had gone in. Packaging and tasting notes to follow.

This is the second run at the Duvel-inspired Belgian hoppy blonde, and it is the batch the recipe was always written for. Everything here — grist, hops, water, mash and boil — is identical to the first round brewed in May. The one deliberate change is the yeast, and it is the whole point of brewing it again.

The recipe came from brewing notes shared by Dimitry Staelens of Adept Brewery in Belgium, and his specified strain was Fermentis SafAle BE-256. In May that yeast was nowhere to be found in New Zealand, so round one went out on Froth Tech Wildling FTW1 instead — a good beer, and a genuinely interesting one, but a substitution rather than the design. BE-256 is back in stock. This batch is the control: same wort, the intended yeast, and a direct read on what the substitution actually cost or gained.

What Changes With BE-256

The two strains pull the beer in noticeably different directions, which is what makes the comparison worth the effort.

Wildling is fruity and phenolic — it throws a spicy, peppery note on top of the fruit, and round one’s first taste leaned so far that way it read almost saison-like. BE-256 is POF-negative, meaning it cannot produce those clove and pepper phenolics at all. The Belgian character it gives is pure ripe fruit and warmth, which should leave a lot more room for the Simcoe and Celeia to sit forward rather than competing with yeast spice.

They also finish in different places. Wildling attenuated about 94% in round one, grinding all the way to 1.004. BE-256 is specified at 82–86% and should stop nearer 1.006–1.008 — still dry, but with a shade more body underneath the hops.

The ferment windows barely overlap. Wildling was held between 18 and 23°C with a hard ceiling; BE-256 wants to start at 20–21°C and free-rise to 26–27°C. That is a genuinely warm ferment, and the warmth is where its fruit comes from.

Brew Day

Mash in at 1:30pm at 63°C. That long low rest is the single most important number in this recipe — it is what makes the wort fermentable enough to finish dry under this much pilsner malt. Step to 72°C at 2:15, mash out at 78°C at 2:35, then 13 litres of sparge water at 78°C from 2:45.

Lower Hutt water is very soft, so it was built up as before: gypsum, calcium chloride and Epsom salt toward a roughly 2:1 sulfate-to-chloride ratio for hop lift, with lactic acid pulling the mash to pH 5.2.

Sixty minutes of boil, ending at 4:25pm. Czech Saaz went in at the start for the soft bittering spine, with the dextrose, Whirlfloc and yeast nutrient added around the 15-minute mark.

The whirlpool repeated round one’s change rather than the written recipe: Simcoe, Celeia and a half zinc tablet into a stand at 75°C for 40 minutes, where the recipe asks for 80°C over 30. Cooler and longer trades isomerised bitterness for aroma and flavour, and it smelled good enough the first time to be worth keeping. Repeating it here is also the disciplined choice for a comparison batch — with the hop exposure held identical across both rounds, any difference in how the hops read in the finished beer belongs to the yeast rather than to the process. Then chilled straight down to 24–25°C for the pitch.

The day ran to plan. What did not run to plan was the numbers.

The Gravity Surprise

About 24 litres went into the fermenter at 1.071. The target was 23 litres at 1.065, and round one had landed 22 litres at 1.062.

That is a bigger deal than it first looks. More volume and more gravity means this is not the usual story of a short boil concentrating the wort — there is genuinely more sugar in the kettle. Multiply it out and round one produced roughly 1,364 gravity points of extract, where this batch made about 1,704 from an identical grain bill. A jump of that size from the same grist is large enough that it is worth putting a calibration check on the hydrometer and the temperature correction at the next reading before treating it as real.

Taking 1.071 at face value, and assuming BE-256 finishes where it should around 1.006–1.008, this beer lands somewhere near 8.3–8.5% ABV rather than the 7.5% the recipe was drawn up for. It also quietly shifts the balance: the hop schedule did not change, but the wort it is sitting in is bigger and stronger, so the bitterness will read a little softer against the malt than round one did.

The one thing the higher gravity does not threaten is pitch rate. Fermentis specify 50 to 80 grams per hectolitre, using the top of that range on high-gravity worts. Two packets is about 23 g into 24 litres, which works out near 96 g/hL — above even the top of the recommended band. If anything the bigger wort is generously pitched rather than stretched.

Fermentation

Two packets of BE-256 were sprinkled dry onto the wort at 24°C around 5 to 5:30pm and the fermenter went into the fridge with the setpoint still at 24°C. The warm pitch is deliberate: dry yeast disperses and rehydrates better on warm wort than cold. From there the chamber pulled the beer down to the 21°C start temperature by about 8:30 to 9pm.

From there the job was to get out of the yeast’s way. BE-256 wants a slow free rise from 21°C up to 26–27°C over two or three days, and the slowness matters — a rushed ramp is what turns Belgian esters hot and solventy instead of fruity. The practical problem is that a fermentation fridge left on a tight setpoint will fight the yeast’s own exotherm and cool away exactly the rise you are trying to encourage. So the cooling hysteresis got progressively widened and the target temperature walked up behind the beer as it climbed rather than holding it down.

It took off cleanly. Fifteen hours in, the beer was already forming a yeast cap and had dropped about five points. By the morning of day two it was at 1.036 and 22.5°C — 35 points gone in a day and a half, a vigorous mid-krausen — so the cooling was opened up further and the target stepped to 22.5°C. Day three read 1.018 at 23°C, roughly three-quarters of the way to a finished gravity, and the target went up again to 23.5°C to keep following the rise toward the 26–27°C peak.

The ceiling is 26–27°C and it is firm. Fermentis put the ideal top of the range at 26°C; Dimitry’s notes push to 27 and warn that beyond it the strain starts throwing hydrogen sulfide, which is his experience rather than anything the manufacturer publishes. Either way the number to respect is the same, and there is no upside to finding out what sits past it.

The dry hop — Simcoe 55 g plus Celeia 45 g — went in at 1pm on day three, at 1.018. That is close to the day-four timing the recipe originally specified for this strain, and a comfortable margin ahead of round one’s day six — but round one was on Wildling, and this faster ferment simply reached the right window sooner. The call was made on gravity rather than the calendar: in while the gravity was clearly still falling and the yeast active enough to clean up any diacetyl thrown by hop creep. As round one did, the spunding valve is set to be closed a turn or two around now to start banking natural carbonation toward the Duvel-style 3.5 volumes this beer is aiming for.