So, I didn’t give my friends a lot of time to decide if they were going to brew or not. I decided Saturday morning that if I am going to get another brew in this year I’m going to have to do it tomorrow. We have a trip planned and Christmas to deal with so I didn’t have much of a choice.
Brief history, I guess from what the folks at BeerAdvocate tell me, this is a relatively new style. First having been produced post-world war II. It is usually high on the fermentables (triple the amount actually, hehe) and when finished is usually golden in color, creamy, and in my opinion a slightly fruity/citrus flavor. In other words, very delicious.
Last Christmas work sent me on a trip to Belgium to work out some issues with a client we had over there. The trip was a success, and made me a HUGE fan of the Belgian beer culture.
Here is a photo of me playing the wife in scrabble at a bar in St. Niklaas enjoying a Karmeleit Tripel. You can tell a Belgian beer by it’s glass, they are always served that way. The brewers design the glasses to make the beer’s aromas and tastes come out in the best possible way. For example, Stella Artois is a pilsner and is served in a smaller, thinner glass with ridges at the bottom to promote the bubbles and as an added benefit, promotes less slippage in your hand 
. (Sorry for the in-bev / anheuser busch example.)
Saturday afternoon I made my yeast starter for the belgian tripel. I recommend this to everyone, get a starter made! Every time I neglect doing so, or do it too late in the process I have been disappointed in the beer’s fermentation. See my post on the Stout, it took 4 days to start fermenting and it now imparts a strange after-taste (still really drinkable, but it could be better… hopefully this remedies itself by bottle conditioning).
Well, the big day happened (brew day!) and it was ridiculously cold outside… so I talked my wife into letting me get a secondary propane tank and sunflower heater. Seriously, it was sub-zero with worse wind chills.
When I put that in front of me with the garage door insulated a bit better… it wasn’t so bad. I could still see my breath, but it was actually quite pleasant! Now I can brew in comfort. On a side note, it ran out of propane halfway through the brew right before I started the boil. That meant that the burner kept me warm and I needed more propane anyway… good luck there!
Also, you can see my laptop running mythtv. I was watching the Vikings… good game, one sided, but good. Really glad I wired my garage for cat-5.
Sparge time! Hello redneck brewing system ™!
If I ever upgrade these components (which I’m probably going to do sooner than later), I’m going to use the truck as long as I can. It is seriously funny to me (the nerd in me laughs).
I was going this alone, so I did not have access to my brother’s sparge arm and extra kettle and burner. So, I finally got to try out the homemade sparge arm I built out of some cpvc. You need to use cpvc because regular pvc starts to leak contaminants when you run liquids through it that are warmer than 120 * F.
Then disaster struck! Soon after taking this photo, I backed into my hot water tun and it spilled all over the floor. One gallon of liquids instantly froze to my garage floor. I let the mash tun water run into the pot and started the boil with only a little over 5 gallons of wort. I was hoping to get 6 gallons or more and boil it down to 5 and a half gallons.
If I had done so, I would have both reached my OG I was targeting (I ended up higher by .07) and had 5 gallons of beer after fermentation/secondary. I thought about adding more water to it prior to the boil, but decided not to. You can comment below if what I did was wrong, or if adding water would have been okay.
I ended up doing the boil with the cover on to keep as much liquids as i could.
Here it is after everything was said and done. I ended up doing the cooling and adding of the yeast in my basement. I didn’t want a big ice slick in my yard, and this was much more comfortable.
The next morning fermentation was already rocking!
OG 1080
-Troy
