Belgian Tripel

by Mongol

I used to be into brewing my own beer. It's a fun hobby, but I just haven't had time to do it in about a year. I found a post I had made where I documented one of the brew processes and I thought I would share. It was orignally posted for fellow brewers, so I'll try to fill any details I orignally left out.

• The recipe.

• The dry stuff. Top row: Hops sack 1, 2, and 3. Bottom row: Grain sack (Belgian malt and Flaked Oats), Malto Dextrin, and Belgian Candi Sugar.

• The wet ingredients: 11 pounds of Liquid Malt Extract (Pale and Wheat) and Water, plenty of water

• First, I steeped the grain bag in a gallon of water for 30 minutes.

• While steeping, I got the fermenter bucket ready. 10 pounds of ice and 2 gallons of cold water will bring the wort down to a workable temperature.

• A grain sack that has given all it can. Yumm.

• I put the malt extract in pan with water and a towel under it, so that it could warm up and pour a little better.

• My digital thermometer broke when I was making my first brew, so I picked up the cheap one. It works well enough, but it means my hand has to get very hot from all the steam.

• Adding the malt extract with the heat off. At this point, the brew becomes so filled with starch that you really have to keep an eye on it.

• This was interesting, Belgian Candi Sugar. It left a little syrup in the measuring cup. Very tasty.

• MALTO DEXTRIN! How nefarious does that sound? I had to look up why i was adding this.

• It turns out it adds body and sweetness. So far, for sugar, I've got grain, malt extract, candi sugar, and the malto dextrin. Lots of sugar + fermentation = lots of alcohol. :)

• And then the first hops sack, which was just Challenger hops. This one is for bittering, to counter all the sweetness you get from grains and the other sugars. When I bought the supplies, I got to learn a little brewer's math. See, the recipe calls for 7.7% alpha acid level in these hops, but they were only 7.0. So, to get the same HBU (home bittering unit, also known as AAU, alpha acid unit), I had to add slightly more hops.

• I fear nothing like I fear foam. My first brew, I had the pot pretty full and it took a while to boil and when it did, it foamed EVERYWHERE. Huge mess, pissed-off Mongol.

• While the first hops sack was boiling, I pulled out the yeast from the fridge and let it come to room temperature. This liquid yeast is really high quality stuff; it really helps the beer taste exactly how you want it to.

• I didn't take a picture of this stuff before I put it in the bag, but I wanted to show what was in the second hops sack, since it's more than just hops. Here are bitter orange peel. These, along with crushed coriander seeds, and the Styrian Goldings hops, are for flavoring as opposed to the first sack, which was bittering.

• And here is a picture of the irish moss. Though its in the flavoring sack, its just to promote clarity in the brew.

• After boiling for 45 minutes, its time to put the second hops sack in.

• 11 minutes later, the last hops sack goes in. This one has more Styrian Goldings hops and Coriander seeds, as well some Czech Saaz hops. These hops are used for aroma in the final product.

• After 4 minutes, I finally get a break. As per the recipe, I let the wort chill out for 20 minutes.

• Here is the brew in the fermenter. I stir it around a bit, as you can see there are still ice cubes floating around.

• When I got the supplies, I picked up a hydrometer. This brew came up as having a specific gravity of 1.084. As it ferments, that number will go down and by taking the difference between the original gravity and final gravity, I'll have the percent alcohol by volume.

After all that, I pitched the yeast and put in my closet for a long rest, with great hopes of the yeast eating and making all that tasty alcohol.

Originally, that is where the post ended, so that is also where the pictures ended. On the lid of the bucket, there is a device called a Bubbler. The bubbler is designed to allow carbon dioxide that is produced from fermentation to escape, while keeping other stuff out. This bubbler is also the best way to gage the process of your young beer, or wort. For most brews, you just wait until the the bubbling slows down, however, for this brew, because of the high final alcohol volume, I had to rack, or pour the beer into another fermenting bucket and dump out the dead yeast, and then pitch another tube of yeast in. When the fermentation process ended, about 3-4 weeks later, I made a simple syrup of honey and water. Once the syrup had some together, I poured it into an empty fermenting bucket and then racked the beer into it, so that the syrup could incorporate into the beer. The reason for adding the syrup is that during fermentation, the yeast created a whole bunch of alcohol, but all the carbon dioxide escaped out the bubbler, so this beer is flat, and nobody likes flat beer. If I were putting this beer into a keg, I could just inject carbon dioxide into the beer, but since I bottled, I had to give the yeast more sugar to eat to produce the gas.

Once the beer was racked, I began the process of bottling, which simply consists of filling clean beer bottles with the brew and the capping them. Once the beer had been used up, I stuck them back in the closet for carbonation. In the end, I had a very strong and popular beer to share.