Tricolored Heron Trippel II - August 2014
Belgian Trippel. All grain. Five-gallon batch. We brewed a one-gallon version back in June, and it was one of our favorite beers. This recipe is called "A Well-Made Tripel" in the Brooklyn Brew Shop book titled Beer Making Book.
Ingredients - Five Gallon
ABV is suppose to be 9.9%
- 14 lbs Belgian Pilsner malt
- 0.4 lbs Caramel 10 malt
- 1.5 oz East Kent Golding hops
- 0.5 oz Saaz hops
- 1.25 lbs -Belgian Candi Sugar- We used a brownish-colored, unrefined sugar, called Demerara, I think.
- yeast:
- Book recommended: Wyeast Belgian Abbey 1218 or Safale S-33
- We used Wyeast Trappist HG 3787, and Deb decided to use two packets, since it's a big beer.
- 1 cup of honey for bottling when that day comes.
- Book suggested orange blossom honey for bottling
- We'll use raw local honey, purchased from the Phoenix Earth Food Co-op.
Procedure
- 60-minute mash
- 60-minute boil
- chilled wort to 70 to 75 degrees.
Brew-day Notes
We brewed this five-gallon batch in our back driveway on Sat afternoon and evening, Aug 16, 2014.
At 3:10 pm set water on burner.
At 3:23 pm, mash begins.
Mash temp 150 degrees at 3:29 pm. Drinking the saison that we brewed on July 4.
Mash at 150 degrees at 3:58 pm.
Nice afternoon. Breezy. Partly cloudy. Temps in low 80s.
Only took about 8 min to get sparge water to 170 degrees. Good burner.
After mash done, drained some wort for a bit until clear.
At 4:53 pm, done adding all sparge water to mash tun. Did drain during this part. Will let all sparge water and all wort and grain rest in cooler for 15 min.
While in the back driveway brewing, the female HAWO, a DOWO, and the young RBWO were on the feeder setup at same time per Deb.
Done with the sparge process at 5:25 pm. Placed wort on burner. Waiting now for it to reach boil.
Boil began 5:44 pm.
We prob have 8 gallons of wort. Too much. Will need a longer or more vigorous boil.
First hops added at 6:17 pm. We're using a violent boil instead of vigorous or rolling.
At 7:12 pm, second and the last hops added.
At 7:18 pm, boil ends. Unrefined sugar added then.
7:22 pm wort chilling begins.
Wort at 110 degrees at 7:27 pm.
Chilled to 72 degrees.
At 8:01 pm blow off tube applied. Done except for cleanup.
Fermenting
- Began fermentation in the dinging room. It became extremely active on Sun, Aug 17 with rumbling, grumbling, low thundering sounds of gas moving through the blow-off tube and into a glass jug. I think Barney thought it was thunder. He seemed a little nervous.
Photos
Five gallon Trippel. Mash start.
Some of our brewing gear. Deb filtered the water, using our Brita pitcher and stored the water in containers.
Drinking our Saison from the five-gallon batch that we brewed on Jul 4, 2014.
After mash ended, Deb drained some of the wort, and placed it back into the mash. This continued until the wort ran mostly clear. And then sparging began.
Sparging.
About to boil. Using screen to prevent falling debris from entering.
Boil.
Near the end of a 90-minute boil.
Final hops added to boil.
Wort chilling.
Agitating after yeast packets were added.
The fermentation gang. Wit, Trappist ale, and Trippel.
Bottling
We bottled 50 bottles on Fri, Sep 19, 2014.
For the bottling sugar, we used one cup of local honey.
We tasted some of the beer, and it tasted strong, but it's suppose to have a high ABV.
Moving the beer from the fermenter into another bucket, so that the bottling sugar can be added.
Need to wait two weeks. Hopefully, this tastes as good as the one-gallon batch made back in the early summer. If it's tasty, and since we have 50 bottles, this should last a while, which means we should taste improvements as it ages.
Drinking
We drank our first bottle on Fri, Oct 3, 2014, and we liked it. It's definitely stronger than the Spencer Abbey Trappist clone beer. This trippel, however, is dangerously smooth too. It should get better with age, and we should have some for a while. This first bottle was slightly over-carbonated.
November 2014
It's definitely over-carbonated. This is occurring too often, so we need to reduce the amount of raw, local honey that we use by a third.
One bottle that I opened volcanoed immediately. It was a total goner.
On another night, I chose not to finish one of these beers because the taste was off. It seemed too strong. It did not taste as good as the one-gallon version.
Instead of using the simple Belgian Candi Sugar, we used Demerara for this five-gallon recipe. We made the same substitution for our five-gallon version of the Belgian Wit, and that beer also does not taste as good as the one-gallon version.
It's likely, however, that this sugar change has made no difference in the beers. We did make other tweaks to the five-gallon wit compared to its one-gallon recipe, which could have contributed to the difference. And maybe we have difficulty brewing at the five-gallon level, compared to one- and two-gallon recipes.
I would prefer that we use the exact same ingredients when moving from a one-gallon batch to a five-gallon recipe, so that we can rule out ingredients as a possible cause for significant taste difference.
Even if everything was identical, the beers will probably always taste a little different because of time and temperature variables during mashing and fermentation. For fermentation, our house temp will vary quite a bit between July and January.
December 2014
On Sat, Dec 13, 2014, we dumped this beer, nearly 50 bottles. It was severely over-carbonated. When opened, most bottles geysered several inches high. It was funny to watch. A few bottles made a loud popping sound when opened.
When it was possible to taste the beer, it tasted terrible. I don't know what specific kinds of off-flavors it had, but I do know that we both thought that the beer tasted terrible.
We also dumped our five-gallon batch of the Belgian Wit because it tasted bad too.
These are the trippels being emptied. It happens. Can't go undefeated.
Here's a photo of the bad trippel that we managed to drink. It was darker than the one-gallon version. Maybe that's due to this five-gallon batch using a different sugar during the boil.
One-gallon Trippel
Today, Dec 13, 2014, Deb found a bottle of the trippel from the one-gallon batch that we brewed on Jun 4, 2014. Our basement temp is now in the upper 50s. This bottle sat on the basement floor, so we did not refrigerate it first before opening.
Back in the summer, we liked this one-gallon trippel a lot, which is why we brewed the five gallon version in August.
This evening's bottle was a pleasant and surprise find now in December. The beer aged well because it tasted great. We both liked it better than the La Trappe Isid'or that we bought today, although they are different styles.