I wrote this month’s recipe myself. It’s only our fourth brew day, and our experience in homebrewing is negligible compared to some people we know. Am I crazy to be creating a recipe from scratch already? I must be crazy. Crazy crazy.

Our big leap into recipe writing is made all the ballsier by our choice of style. This month, we’re making a Belgian Tripel. Possibly my single favorite style — hence my burning desire to make one — Tripel is a sweet, golden, light bodied, yet ferociously alcoholic beer. Hop bitterness is typically subdued but noteworthy, ceding the floor to sweet, pale malts and spices. Belgian candi sugar lightens the body while creating complex alcohol aromas, and Trappist-style yeast produces warm, banana-like esters that burst forth from a dense, creamy white head.

High alcohol content (ours will be around 8.5% or 9% ABV, but I’ve seen as high as 12%) is disguised by the ample sweetness. When it’s aged properly, it’s not uncommon to mistake this for a lighter session beer before falling out of your chair after half of a pint… which is one of the reasons why it is typically only served in a 10 oz tulip glass.

For a beer as big as this, it is very important that one create a yeast starter two or three days in advance. Creating a yeast starter gives your yeast extra time to wake up and reproduce in a light wort before getting dumped into the heavy wort that this recipe produces. The end result is a faster fermentation that starts sooner. We’ll go into detail on how this is done soon. In the mean time, however, my brother-in-law has an excellent yeast starter tutorial in his Picasa gallery here. He doesn’t do it quite the same way that I do starters (I don’t use an airlock, for example), but you won’t ever go wrong following Tim’s advice. The guy knows brewing better than anyone I’ve ever met.

Note that you could certainly try to do this without a yeast starter, but even with the starter, ours took two days to get up to full speed. Without the starter, we could have gone a week without seeing anything happen. By that time, one could only guess what other kind of microbes will have taken up shelter in all of that sweet, delicious wort.

But enough worrying. Here’s how we did it:

30 August, 2008
Belgian Tripel
5 gallons

3 lbs Light Dry Malt Extract (60 min)
6 lbs Pilsner Light Liquid Malt Extract (15 min)

8 oz CaraVienne Malt (Steeping)
8 oz CaraFoam Malt (Steeping)

1 lb Belgian Candi Sugar (60 min)

1 oz Vanguard Hops [4.4% AA] (60 min)
1 oz Sterling Hops [6.0% AA] (15 min)
1 oz Sterling Hops [6.0% AA] (1 min)

1 oz Crushed Whole Coriander Seed (15 min)
2 oz Sweet Orange Peel (15 min)

1 tablet Whirlfloc (20 min — clarifier)

White Labs Trappist Yeast WLP500

4 oz corn sugar (bottling)

———

Steep grains at 155°F for 30 minutes.

The boil will be for 60 minutes. Remove grains, turn off heat, and add dry malt extract while stirring. Add candi sugar and stir until dissolved. DO NOT add liquid malt extract yet!

Bring to a boil. Add Vanguard hops.

With 20 minutes remaining, add Whirlfloc tablet.

With 15 minutes remaining, turn off heat. Remove Vanguard hops and add liquid malt extract while stirring.

Return to a boil. Return Vanguard hops to the boil. Add 1 oz Sterling hops, along with crushed coriander seed and orange peel.

With 1 minute remaining, add 1 oz Sterling hops.

Chill wort to ~80°F. Pitch yeast. Allow to ferment to completion at ~70°F.

Rack to secondary fermenter. Age for at least two weeks before bottling.

Definitely a more complex recipe than we’ve brewed so far, and I confess that I did at times fail to relax, insisted on worrying, and did not have a homebrew. Make a checklist. Plan out every detail ahead of time and just follow your list. You’ll have a much less stressful brew day if you do.

This took twice as long as we expected to begin fermenting, but it did start eventually. Just be prepared for a couple days of worrying, followed by a moment of elation when your fiancée spots the first suggestion of krausen on the surface of your wort. Phew…

Also, keep in mind that this is going to be a fairly long and slow fermentation. I won’t be especially surprised if primary fermentation takes more than two weeks to complete. Let it do its thing. Good beer takes time.

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