a return to cbay

Belgian Tripel

What would a new home be without a new homebrew? I asked myself this very question last week. A new home would be incomplete. Besides, the week before last I was picking up someone for work who'd flown in from out of town, and he asked to put his luggage in my trunk. Of course he couldn't because all my brewing supplies were in there, still neatly tucked away from the move.

A few years back Brewer's Art bottled a specialty Belgian tripel with green peppercorns. I've tasted it a couple of times, and it's good, but I don't think I knew what I was supposed to be looking for. The Belgian beers are an interesting brew that I really don't know much about. On quite literally the hottest day of the year last summer, Roger, Jefe, and I drove a few hours to Philadelphia to Monk's Cafe, a bar specializing in Belgian biers.



In the dark, backroom bar we tried our hand at 2 or 3 yellow-amber biters before heading back out into code red mugginess.




I've had a number of different types, and I like them quite a bit (particularly the sour ones), and so I decided to try my hand at one. With pepper. I found a basic recipe online and modified it a bit, for better or for worse, we'll soon find out:

6 lbs light dry malt extract
3 lbs light pale malt extract syrup (original called for 2)
2 lbs light Belgian Candy Sugar (original called for 1lb, 12oz)
8oz flaked wheat
8oz American Crystal 20
4oz Belgian Aromatic

2oz Cascade Hops
2oz Williamette Hops

1oz Coriander (original called for .33oz)
1oz Seeds of Paradise (original called for .33oz)
.5oz Irish Moss
1oz Orange Peel, sweet (original called for bitter)
.5oz Coarsely cracked Rainbow Peppercorn Mix

Wyeast Trappist High Gravity (3787)

I put all the grains in one sock and turned up the heat on 2 and 1/2 gallons of unfiltered Denver tap water. Why tap water? Basically, because I'm an idiot. I bought all my supplies but neglected to buy filtered water. The result of which is yet to be determined. When the water began to boil I pulled out the grains and drained them.


I then added the liquid extract and sloooooowly added the candy sugar. The guy at the brew store warned me about candy rock sticking to the bottom of the brew pot, burning, and then ruining the wort. This would not happen to me, I swore. And it didn't.


I'll tell ya, too, I rather like the plastic screw-top container for the liquid malt.


So, you get the wort boiling again and then toss in the first ounce of Cascade hops. The rest of this boiling process should take only 60 more minutes.


One ounce of Cascade and one ounce of Williamette go in at the 30 minute mark. In the mean time, prepare your bucket or carboy by sanitizing it. You'll also want to start milling your coriander, seeds of paradise, and cracked peppercorns.


With only 15 minutes left on the boil, throw in the last of the Williamette hops and add your coriander, seeds of paradise, pepper, and orange peels. Continue the boil for 15 minutes and remove it from the heat. Slowly pour it into your fermenting container and then, like an idiot, bring the wort to 5 gallons by adding ice cold tap water.


Once the container is sealed, cool the wort quickly (I placed mine in an ice-cold bath and it was cooled in less than an hour).


You're going to want to bring the wort to around 64 degrees before pitching the yeast. Trappist yeast has an optimum fermenting temperature between 64 and 72 degrees.

Some notes:

• OG: 1.100 (that's a first!)

• It's been steadily and quietly fermenting for a week now. Nothing too exciting to see here, no roaring fermentation.

• The highest temperature the batch has reached is 72 degrees. I couldn't have asked for better conditions.

• Things, a week later, have started to slow down a little, though there is no real sign of stopping in the immediate future. I'm not foolish enough to think that I'll end up with anything greater than 9%ABV because of this, though an 11% or 12% would certainly be nice. I've been tricked before into thinking I've done things right to achieve those results, only to find I overestimated the yeast's ability. Still, using Wyeast this time may do the trick as it comes with it's own nutrient packet to jump start it. Time will tell.

3/4/09 - So here we are, the bubbling hadn't stopped completely but was happening about once every 20 seconds or so and this is why I decided it would be a good time to re-rack. I bought a glass carboy, a siphoner, and went to work. Next time I brew this beer I will place the coriander, irish moss, orange peels, etc into a hob bag or some sack that will hold it all together. I must have lost about 1/2 gallon of beer because the siphoner stopped working due to too much clogging. And maybe I racked it too early. I pulled out a lot of yeast as well. Gravity today is 1.036 putting the beer around the 8.7% ABV mark. Something tells me there is more to go. The tastes at this point are distinctly orangey and hoppy. Perhaps some peppercorn flavors if you look for it. This will likely intensify as it matures, and this is maybe a good reason for getting the beer to the secondary and off the peppercorn. It's got an almost hot feel, also sweet, also bitter. We'll see how it turns out.

3/13/09 - I bottled the beer last night. The total gallons of wort? 4. I remembered my problem too late. After boiling the wort, it's best to pour it into the fermenter through a funnel with a filter in it to take out the large chunks of, in this case, orange peel, hops, peppercorns, coriander, etc. When sending it to the secondary the siphon clogged numerous times. By the time I got down to the bottom slog there had to be at least a 1/2 gallon of beer available, if not for the muck and slime. Almost everything (but the settled yeast and hops) transferred out of the secondary carboy to the bottling bucket but I somehow mistook the "closed" for the "open" on the spiggot and so lost another good bit while filling the bottling bucket. I did, however, manage to gather some for a gravity reading. More on that later.

So, I started sanitizing the bottles and the bottling bucket in the traditional way (bleach in the bathtub). Notice the early evening light coming through the blinds in the reflection, thanks to daylight savings. Actually, daylight savings was a welcome change for me this year:


This picture makes everything look a little ghostly but you can't help making things awkward with a flash. Notice there appears to still be some fermenting yeast on top. I didn't know what to do about that. It's been so long since I re-racked the beer that I was worried it was going to mold or go bad. Fermentation had, for all intents and purposes, stopped. So I went ahead with the bottling. I put the carboy up on the sink in front of the coffee pot and toaster oven:


I rinsed the bottles and organized them:


Boiled the priming malt. . .1 2/3 cups of malt sugar in 2 cups water:


Took a gravity reading (1.026) and then combined the priming sugar and wort into the bottling bucket:


And began to fill the bottles:


All in all, I got 36 bottles of beer:


When I'm not panicking, I'm generally a "glass is half full" kind of guy. 36 bottles of beer is short of the 50 or so I should have gotten but that's ok. It's now officially a rare brew. Next time (I brew this kind) I'll be sure to do things correctly. A couple things I'd do differently:

1. filter the wort before pitching the yeast.
2. add yeast nutrient, despite what the guy at the store tells me.

The final gravity was 1.026, which, according to this awesome calculator I found it puts the beer at about 9.9%. This is not such a bad result! Consider "Fin du Monde", Chimay, etc. Still, when tasting the beer, as I've been doing tonight whilst blogging and brewing yet another tasty belgian batch, it's clearly syrupy sweet. The Wyeast packet itself states that it "inoculate"s 5 gallons of wort "(up to 1.060 SG)" and if you remember our SG was 1.100! So yes, I think the yeast nutrient would have helped and would have given to a drier, or at least less sweet beer. Perhaps, in the end, the sweetness will be it's saving grace.

There are notes of sweet orange peel, where I wish I'd used bitter. There are hints of cracked peppercorn too, but for once I think I got something right. Nothing overwhelming and you might not even notice it unless you look for it, which might be what the Brewer's Art knew to do too.

Of course, it isn't carbonated or chilled yet, so, these things may change as the weeks go on. We shall see. I've decided on something better thought out and more straightforward for my next batch.

There's a couple albums worth

of leaked excellent low fi-ish Elliot Smith demos and live recordings if you follow the links.

Minor Recap

The view from my hotel room on Super Bowl Sunday:

The view from the window this morning:



Two bright spots from the last two weeks. I have had the itch to write more this week and will if I can come up with anything to tell.

Steve Malkmus likes fantasy sports and the Jicks. Me too.

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

David Byrne encourages you to share and embed and buy it if you like it.

A Sign of Things to Come

Apollo Ghosts - Ghost, Get Out of My Apartment

A Bulled New World.

Clearly the Belgian need a gorilla breeding program.

All my favorite singers couldn't sing.

All my favorite singers couldn't sing, oh yeah.

punk rock died when the first kid said:

the silver jews aren't dead.

Man, it's like this blog is based out of Denver...

or something, dead.

Here's a blog based in India. Vibrant. It's written by Tboz's cousin's husband, whose there studying as a part of his PHD in Buddism program. It's a terrific travel log. i suggest starting at the end and reading to the present.