Belgian Tripel Brewday

Three days ago I gave my first shot at a Tripel, and it was quite a blast. Not only did I brew a lot of beer but I also drank a lot of beer. Anyway, here is the recipe I made:

Malts – 13 lb Maris Otter, 2 lb Munich, 1 lb Aromatic, 12 oz Crystal 10L

Other fermentables – 1.5 lb Turbinado Sugar (added at 30 min in boil)

60 min boil – added .6 oz Northern Brewer hops at 60 min, .4 oz bitter orange peel at 30 min, .6 oz Sterling hops at 15 min, .05 oz clove at 30 sec, .25 oz coriander at 30 sec, .2 oz Jamaica allspice at 30 sec

Yeast – WLP500 Trappist Ale Yeast

Targets – 60 min mash at 152 degrees F, pre-boil gravity 1.073, original gravity 1.090

Brew day numbers – 60 min mash at 154-155 deg F, pre-boil gravity 1.073, original gravity 1.097

If anyone doesn’t know what this stuff means then let me know and I’ll explain. Moving on, here are some brew day pics:

  

After extracting 5 gallons of the tripel from the mash, we went ahead and extracted another gallon into a separate pot for a lighter beer. This one came out too light though, so we added 1.5 lbs of honey into the boil along with some Sterling and Cascade hops and a little bit of Jamaica allspice; the original gravity came out to be 1.078. We used the same yeast in this as we did for the tripel, here is a pic:

All of that sediment floating around will filter out during bottling. Thanks to Brian, Rich and Taylor for their help. Here is a picture of all the beer we were drinking while brewing, the two on the right are from our last two batches of homebrew, one is a pale ale and the other a stout:

New Fermentation Chamber

I recently ordered a Johnson Controls A419 Temperature Controller for an old fridge that I got for free from a friend that moved across the country.  I wired it up and now I’ve got a nice little fermentation chamber that I can use for either ales or lagers. Right now I’ve got it set up to not go any higher than 73 deg F, and it’s been sitting right around 71 for the most part, which is perfect for the beer I will be brewing tomorrow which is a Belgian Tripel using the WLP500 Trappist Ale Yeast. Here are some pics:

        

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Homebrew Closet

Check out the new beer closet!

Got 90 beers bottle conditioning on the shelf and 2.5 gallons of a cider-mead combination in the carboy on the floor. We will be doing a partigyle brew within the next couple weeks so that cider-mead will soon be joined by 5 gallons of a Belgian tripel and a gallon of some sort of session beer.

We also have a temperature controller on the way to wire into our spare fridge we picked up from a friend, so we’ll also have a nice little fermentation chamber for the summer.

Brewday Redemption

So after our brewday disaster, my brother and I gave it another shot yesterday and it went very well. We now have a brown ale in the primary fermenter with the airlock happily bubbling. We have cocoa nibs soaking in chocolate vodka and 4 pounds of strawberries in the freezer, all waiting to be added to the beer once the primary fermentation is complete.

I don’t know what style beer this will be when it’s finished, but I do know it’ll taste like the best chocolate covered strawberry you’ve ever had in your life. WOOOO!!!

brewday disaster

My brother and I had a brewday last Friday for an interesting beer that we’re extremely pumped for (I’ll post what the beer is when we have a successful brewday for it).  Anyway, the day was going along as planned, we had everything organized and sanitized and ready to go, we did a 1 hour mash, by the end of which we were at a total of about 4 hours of work on the brewday, and then we went to vorlauf and get ready to sparge and found out that during the mash, the hardware in the mashtun had come apart and therefore the wort wouldn’t drain. So we had 10 pounds of grain and about 4 gallons of wort and we couldn’t figure out how to separate them! It sucked! So we put our yeast starter that we had prepared the night before in the fridge along with the hops we were getting ready to use, and pretty much just dumped the wort and grains so now we have to go drop another 20 bucks to get the grains again and restart our brewday probably this coming Monday after repairing our mashtun and making sure that won’t happen again.

Moral of the story: always check your equipment beforehand!

POOP

This beer is going to be awesome though.

expanding my brewing knowledge

Today I downloaded Basic Brewing Radio podcasts onto my ipod so that whenever I’m driving or cooking or taking a walk or whatever, I can put in my headphones and learn about beer brewing.

Beer is good

Here’s the thing, almost everybody likes to drink, and the human race will drink beer as long as we exist. You can make this incredible creation right in your own home, and then get hammered off of it. Can life get better?