Brew #32: Tripel 2

Wendie and I spent the day hanging out with our friends, the Clevelands. Despite the cold and icy weather, and about 10 cars along side the road from slipping on ice we made it across the valley for a brew day. Just in time for the final brew of 2007, I put together another Belgian Tripel! Should be a good brew!

Tripel 2
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Brewer: Josh Gum
Style: Belgian Tripel
Batch: 5.50 gal, Mashed

Characteristics
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Recipe Gravity: 1.087 OG
Recipe Bitterness: 27 IBU
Recipe Color: 6° SRM
Estimated FG: 1.022
Alcohol by Volume: 8.8%
Alcohol by Weight: 6.8%

Ingredients
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Belgian pilsener 11.00 lb, mashed
German vienna 3.00 lb, mashed
German wheat 0.25 lb, mashed
Belgian candi sugar 2.00 lb, extract

Kent Golding 1.50 oz, whole, 60 minutes
Kent Golding 0.50 oz, whole, 15 minutes

Trappist Ale Yeast (WLP500) 1.00 unit, tube
Irish Moss 1.00 unit, clarifying

Notes
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Recipe Notes:
Mash @ 148F for 90min

Batch Notes:
OG around 22 brix, or 1.088

1/6: ferment complete, tons of banana aroma!!! It tastes very very alcoholic right now, which over time should mellow out.. FG 2.5 brix, or 1.010

4/22: carbonating in the keg for the past 3 days. Can’t wait to give it a taste!

5/1: tons of banana on the nose. the beer tastes of spices and fruity with a sour tartness. The first few pints were a bit extra tart, but that seems to be mellowing a little bit

5/4: I tried Ommegangs Hennipen, a belgian Saison beer, and I thought mine tasted similar. I was worried at first that the tartness was out of style, but I’m thinking now that its actually just fine as it mellows a little bit.

7/12: Not much foam on the pour, aroma is sweet grainy and fruity. Mouthfeel is medium heavy with medium carbonation on a yellow-copper totally clear beer. The tartness is almost totally gone and replaced with a sweet alcohol balanced against spices and a banana flavor. The hop bitterness is well in the background and serves only to balance the sweetness, although this might be leaning toward sweetness rather than bitter.. The aftertaste is dry and leaves an alcohol heat in the breath and nose. Pretty damn good beer!

My Lambic’s first birthday!

Happy Birthday to the billions (or more) of bacteria and yeasts that have been steadily and silently growing in a 5 gallon bucket of “beer” in my closet… I gotta admit, I was a little nervous to taste this shit, the pics don’t do the full justice to the gnarly sight and the sorta rotten fruit smell. Anyhow, there was no green mold (I’ve read that green indicates undesireable bugs) and no known human pathogen can survive in that amount of alcohol anyway so I just pretended I didn’t see where the sample came from and took a swig.. The taste is really unusual, a little malty, but super sour and a little vinegary. There’s no hop aroma, or flavor but maybe a touch of bitterness. I wouldn’t say this is as acidic as squeezed lemon juice, but definitely approaching that sourness. FG was 1.010. I plan to blend maybe 1 gallon of this in a 5 gallon pale ale and then decide what to do with the remaining 4 gallons. If the blend works out well, I’ll go ahead and start another 1 or 2 lambics for aging.

Here are a few neat pics, looks tasty yea?!

Dangerously tasty sourdough bread..

I’ve been fiddling with sourdough starters and trying to make “artisan” bread for the past several weeks.. you know the type, its the bread you get with the big holes and slightly chewy, the crust is usually blistered and has a damn good crunch on the crust. I tried several times doing the traditional kneading the bread, let it rise, punch it down, shape it into a loaf or boule, let rise a second time, and finally bake. I kept getting super dense loaves, crappy crust, and generally poor taste.. so I gave up for a few weeks…….until:

regular sourdough (left), garlic and pesto sourdough (right)

A friend of mine, John M, who gave me a portion of his sourdough starter to use also mentioned a few weeks back that his friends had taken a class on how to make artisan bread and it was made in a dutch oven with no kneading.. To Google I searched and quickly found everything I ever wanted to know about how to make some really kick ass bread with very little effort, sweet.

From the fountain of Google springith a site which has some great and short videos online showing exactly how make/maintain a starter and to bake the bread with the ‘no knead’ method and a dutch oven. http://www.breadtopia.com it helped me tremendously just to see the process so I can adjust mine accordingly. (ie. Instead of using a proofing basket for the second rise, I use a plastic tupperware bowl sprayed with olive oil and lightly coated with corn meal and flax seeds)

1. http://www.breadtopia.com/sourdough-starter-management/ How to maintain and build up a starter..

2. http://www.breadtopia.com/sourdough-no-knead-method/ The method for making the dough and baking the bread.. The comments at the bottom of the page have some great info too.

Here are a couple of things I’ve read along the way:

1. Try to keep the starter from touching metal, this has a negative affect on the yeast.. So no metal spoons, containers, etc.

2. Water is all important.. Do not use chlorinated water, chlorine tends to kill biological thingies, such as yeast and bacteria (which we want both of in sourdough)

3. Don’t worry too much about measuring ingredients by weight, as he mentions in the video its really all about the consistency of the starter and dough.. Once you’ve had a chance to try this out a few times you’ll get a sense of how much flour and water to use to get to the right consistency… I was surprised to see just how wet the dough is and get great results, it was the consistency of really thick pancake batter. When I pour the dough onto the floured counter top, its really slack and doesn’t want to keep its shape.

And finally, if you’ve made it this far into the article and I haven’t lost your interest.. maybe you’d like a sourdough starter to use in making your own bread.. feel free to email me and I can easily make you a starter (if you’re local), or snail mail you a packet of dried starter which can easily be revived and used within days..

Go SGF reader for Pocket PC

I’ve been sporting the Palm Treo 700wx for the past couple of months, using Pocket PC 2005, and have been without Go game record viewers.. I’ve tried a few of the more common readers but hadn’t spent the time to find one that actually works. Well, I found “MultiGo” for the Pocket PC and its working well for me! Woohoo, I can record my games and replay professional games now when I’m bored!

Next time I buy a “smartphone” the thing had better damn well be able to run a fricking Java Mobile Virtual Machine!! Geez, thanks for no support to that end Micro$oft.

Peace.