Joey's Tripel

We all know Joey likes 2 things about her beer. 1) Alcohol >7%- without even knowing the alcohol percentage, she will taste a beer and if she doesn't like it, there is a 90% chance that it is <7% alcohol. 2) Belgian Flavor. Put a Belgian beer in front of her and she'll like it; almost guaranteed.

Tripel is her favorite style, with Tripel Karmeliet being her favorite. We thought we would try our hand at making this classic style of beer but taking a more traditional approach to the style. The Belgian Trappist brewery Westmalle is credited with inventing the style and is considered as the benchmark by which other Tripels are measured. They use a very simple recipe, only base malt, sugar, and hops. Elise wrote this recipe a while ago and it contains Belgian Pilsner malt, a very small amount of American 2-row, 2 lbs of sugar and hops.

Now that we have the fridge set up to heat if needed, we should have a much better beer compared to the Belgian Pale Ale (which was fermented too cold). We will start at 68 degrees for 2 days and then ramp it up to 75 to finish fermentation. By increasing the temperature after 2 days we will eliminate the chance of yeast throwing off flavors resulting from the high temperature and we will also ensure good attenuation. Belgian breweries very commonly get +85% attenuation which is very high. For comparison most of our beers attenuate 75-80%. The warmer temperature will deter the yeast from flocculating and dropping out early so they will be fermenting longer. That, combined with the 2 lbs of sugar should leave a very dry, high alcohol beer.

The picture is of the gravity sample taken and as you can see it is at 1.090 (click on the picture to make it bigger). If it attenuates to what we are expecting we could end up close to, if not over, 10% alcohol. The beer is ligher in color than it appears in the picture and should be a nice golden color. Due to the high alcohol content, this beer probably wont be drinkable for about 4-6 months, but will hopefully make a nice Late Summer/Fall brew.

We were planning on making 7 gallons of beer and fermenting the other 2 gallons with Brett L, but since we only have 1 brett bucket we decided to scratch that plan. In about 4-6 weeks we will bottle the Brett B beer and then use the Brett L in another batch. We are planning on blending a small portion of the Brett B beer with the Biere de Garde and age that for 6 months or so to impart some Brett characters into the beer. Hopefully that will turn out well, and if it does we might do a whole batch that gets some Brett in secondary.

Next week we will be adding the Raspberries to the RIS and will bottle that as well as the Anniversary Barley Wine at the end of the month. After we are done bottling the BW we will have 2- 3 gallon carboys that we will use for a series of Pale Ales utilizing only 1 hop. Both 3 gallon bottles will fit into the fermentation fridge at the same time, so we are planning on doing 2 differnent 2.5 gallon batches at the same time. The grain bill will be the same for all of the beers, so after mashing we will split the wort into 2 kettles and make 2 different beers. We hopefully will do single hop beers with Amarillo, Centennial, Chinook, Columbus, Simcoe, and Cascade hops. By doing single hop beers we will be able to learn what each hops smells and tastes like and can formulate future recipes to which hop flavors/smells we like best.