Tag Archives: #10

The Tripel that Almost Wasn’t and the Quad that May Yet Be

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Well, we haven’t gotten around to blogging about the tripel because, well, we were too busy drinking it.  Because of the trouble in the brew, we weren’t quite sure what to expect.  But it turned out to be very nice, probably my favorite tripel.

It’s not quite as strong as a tripel should be, stalling out around 8.5% instead of the 9.5% we were aiming for.  But it’s nice and creamy, with a rich mouthfeel as a result of all the extra unfermented sugar.  So in many ways it’s a bit more like a dubbel.  So we’ve taken to calling it “Dubbel Axel”, since it’s more like 2.5x instead of 3x.

In any event, flush with quasi-success, we decided to brew a quad.  Well, I should say we were planning on brewing a stout, but even after trying a dozen or so of them, couldn’t agree on what we liked.  So we gave up on the stout idea and just made a Westy 12 clone.  Most of the recipes you see online have a ton of specialty malts that I know St. Sixtus doesn’t use.  So instead we went with a very elemental recipe: 16 lbs. of Pilsner malt, 3 lbs. of candi sugar syrup, Styrian Goldings and Hallertau hops, and White Labs 350 yeast.  Instead of paying a ton for the candi sugar syrup, I found a recipe online and it worked out pretty well.  It took longer than I expected to boil off the water and get the temperature up high enough to convert glucose to fructose.  But once that happened, it worked like a charm.

Unlike last time, things went off without a hitch.  The only small problem was that we had two old thermometers and they couldn’t bring themselves to agree on anything (even boiling water and ice water had 20°+ differences).  So we picked up a new candy thermometer.  Since we were also making candy, it worked out very nicely.

Fun With Refractometer

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A refractometer was on my list of shiny brewing equipment I might get.  And with my hydrometer in shards, I figured now was the time to try it out.  Amazon had a ton of options, many reasonably priced, and so one arrived at our doorstep in a few days.

I was excited about using a refractometer to do gravity readings, because I’d read about it being more precise, using a tiny sample, and not having to do temperature corrections (the tiny sample makes the temperature insignificant compared to the refractometer temp.).  However, I quickly learned two things:

1. You don’t have to do temperature corrections.  But once fermentation starts, you have to do some pretty complicated math based on the original gravity.  So I still need a computer to do gravity readings once fermentation starts.

2. While in theory the display is supposed to be very precise (it’s supposed to look something like this):

In practice, it looks more like this:

So I’m not sure it’s actually any more precise.  Still, the sample size really is just a few drops, and I’m looking forward to the next brew where I can do gravity readings with hot wort and not have to use a computer to do temperature corrections.

Brewing Like a Monk

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Well, maybe with a little more swearing.

My fantastic mother-in-law got me the perfect birthday present this year — Stan Hieronymus‘ Brew Like a Monk.  We’ve been thinking about brewing a tripel ever since we did a big tasting in the Netherlands earlier this year.  And we finally got organized to brew a batch today.  I went to the homebrew shop after lunch and picked up the supplies.  I hadn’t really been planning on brewing today, but I looked at my saison brewing notes (where I actually kept detailed times for everything), and realized we would have time.

So, the mash and boil all went pretty smoothly, except the wort collection ran faster than I intended and so the gravity was low.  But there was enough wiggle room with the addition of candi sugar to the boil, and evaporation, that I wasn’t really sure that it would be a problem.

But, alas, it was a problem.  So I wound up extending the boil by 15 minutes and just barely getting it up to the target (1.080).  Then the fun part started when I turned on the hose for my wort chiller and remembered that I was going to get a new hose, because it leaked last time.  But I guess laying around in the yard for two months didn’t help, because it was leaking a lot more than last time.  So I come back into the house to see a geyser of water spewing from the hose, and the output hose slipping out of the sink onto floor.

I yelled for help and madly grabbed towels to contain the damage.  After some decidely un-monk-like swearing, we got it mostly under control and down to pitching temp.  But one thing and another, we only wound up with about 3 gallons of beer.