Split Batch English Special Bitter and Belgian Pale Ale

Well, I'm a week late in posting, but I've brewed my 3rd ten gallon batch since upping my brewery capacity.  My second batch, which I failed to blog about was a Hefeweizen which is currently in a keg carbonating.  I have high hopes for it.  My first batch, an English Mild, turned out very well.  But it is an English Mild, pretty straightforward and a little too malty for this time of year.

In this batch I was trying to re-use the yeast from the Mild, but I didn't want another 10 gallons of English beer.  Additionally, I've recently found myself interested in all things Belgian beer.  So I thought to myself, 'What would be a good 10 gallon batch of brew that could be easily split to two 5 gallon fermentors and one fermented Englishly and one fermented Belgianly?'  Given the time of season I also had to ask myself, 'What style of beer would be most drinkable this time of season?'  I soon decided that an English Special Bitter would certainly be a good English beer for this time of year and so I thought, 'Perhaps 5 gallons of that wort would make a good Belgian Pale Ale?'

Those who know my brewing style know that I much prefer to make good classic styles that challenge the more technical aspects of brewing more than I like to make unique beers with unique recipes.  I figure if I can make a good classic style and do it repeatably, then when I try my hand at unique beers the result (good or bad) would likely come from ingredient selection rather my brewing prowess.  I digress.

I turned my eye to my faithful book of classic style recipes from Mr. J.Z.  I found that there were a lot of similarities between his English Special and his Belgian Pale.  The differences I felt I could bring to a common ground for the better of this experiment.  Here is the recipe I dreamed up on my own:

18# Dingemann's Belgian Pale Malt
2# Crystal 20L
1# Belgian Cara45
0.5# Crystal 120L

Mash at 151F
Preboil Gravity: 1.044

2.2 oz EKG (5.8%AA) at 60 min
0.8 oz EKG (5.8%AA) at 20 min
0.8 oz EKG (5.8%AA) at 0 min

OG:1.052

5 gallons get hit with WLP002 English Ale Yeast, the other 5 gallons get hit with WLP530 Trappist Ale Yeast.

A week into things and the WLP002 batch has acted as expected.  Pretty quick fermentation with Krausen falling completely around day 4.  The WLP530 took that many days to reach high Krausen before slowly subsiding.  There is still krausen activity though.  I will let both carboys sit at least another week, probably another 2 weeks, before kegging.

One thing I wasn't happy about during the brewday was I ended up getting a lot of the cold-break material into the English Ale fermenter.  I still need to iron out my process of getting from the kettle to the fermentor while leaving as much excess material behind.  Here's a couple pictures form the day:

Belgian fermenting along.

English fermenting along.  Check out that color difference.  Same exact wort looks much lighter though!