homebrewandbeer.com

I apologise if this has been covered already, but I couldn't think of a search string.

When trying to get the final alcohol of a beer up using both malt and simple sugar, I understand that the simple sugars will be eaten first and can impair the yeast's desire to go for the more complex malts. Is there any reason not to add simple sugars after malt has completely fermented out?
Eg a good kit + 1-2 kilos of extract, fermented for 2 weeks, and racked with further invert sugar, aiming for the limit of the yeast's alcohol tolerance.

I want to make some good strong ageing beers to squirrel away in various cellar-like places and recover years later for special occasions.

KEG?

You can add sugars as you go. There is a recipe in the Calagione book for a barley wine where he adds 50g of demerera sugar every couple of days so the yeasties don't get overwhelmed.
It's always better to pitch a decent amount of yeast to start with. I can't remember the recommendations but I think you'd pitch double the amount of yeast than you would for a normal ~5% batch.

HTH,

Tim

The trick I use is as Timmy said- pitch double the yeast. The other thing is to get your yeast to high krausen prior to pitching. You are also better off if you use a yeast that is known to be quite alcohol tolerant.

Have you read the Millenium Ale Project yet?

The general rule is to keep simple sugars below 20% of the overall fermentables, but the reason for this is more to do with yeast nutrition than the yeast preferring simple sugars. When there isn't enough Free Amino Nitrogen (FAN) in the wort, the yeast have to synthesise some of the essential amino acids that they need. Also, you need to ensure good wort oxygenation so that the yeast can synthesise the fatty acids they need to build strong cell walls. If you neglect either of those, yeast viability is impacted and you also get off flavours that are a result of the byproducts of the yeast's biosynthesis processes.

Building up a nice viable yeast population using starters is also a really good idea. Build the starters up on a reasonably weak wort (1.035 or so, which is about 100g malt extract per 1L of starter). I'd probably take the yeast through a few cycles of starter (say three or so) to build up a really massive population of healthy yeast. Then try cold pitching the slurry from the last starter.

A good way to go is to pitch a yeast with a desirable flavour profile (say a belgian yeast, or an ale yeast that you are fond of) and then once it reaches its alcohol tolerance, pitch a more alcohol-tolerant yeast (such as Lalvin EC-1118 which is a champers yeast that can get to 18% alc/vol). That way you get nice flavours from the ale yeast, and the champers yeast can finish it off for you. If you were to just pitch the 1118 you'd get a nasty yeasty flavour profile.

Anyway, HTH, I seem to be rambling today.