A Tale of Two Triples

“I'd rather be a failure at something I enjoyed than be a success at something I hate.” George Burns Just in time for my latest brews, two triples, I've severely cut down on my drinking. In fact I'm getting tired of staring at the same brews in the refrigerator: a Rogue Porter, some assorted Sprechers, a few Avery IPA's and even a lone Bud, from the 2007 Superbowl Party when the Colts took the title during the rain in FL. But the sight for sore eyes hasn't bothered me enough to start drinking them, because after drinking so much for so long, when you stop and sober up for a minute its almost like being drunk it feels so odd. And I kind of like it. I'm trying to shave off a few pounds out of sheer laziness in not wanting to run the mini with a few extra pounds of flab flying along with me. In fact my wife is due a week after the mini marathon so it's a race between baby Boden and I to see who crosses the finish line first. We started with a recipe like this 30 lbs belgian pilsner 0.25 0.25 0.25 0.25 This was done in a kick-ass mash mobile that my brew bud Tim concocted for us. It is a 60 quart cooler with a copper tubing manifold on the bottom and a PVC T-shaped crossbar over the top the create an easy trickle into the mash tun. It was tricky because we lost several degrees while pouring the 175F water into the picnic cooler, which Tim explained as having more mass and therefore sucked more heat out of our water. So we ended up with a mash at about 148F. After the sparge we ended up with one 4.5 gallon batch of 1.090 gravity, to which I had added 1.5lbs of clear Belgian candy sugar. The other was pure wort and clocked in at 1.070. We pitched two packets of yeast in the high gravity: one a trappist yeast, and another belgian yeast so there was a mixed yeast population. This beer fermented down to 1.014 in 2 weeks after being racket after about the first week. The other beer is still bubbling away in the fermenter and we haven't checked the gravity yet. We did use a stainless steel aeration stone with an aquarium pump and inline filter for about 20 minutes to aerate the wort, which appears to have worked just fine and is a little less sloppy buy probably no more effective than sloshing at around with a siphon pump. So Saturday night I cracked one open to much delight. Not a ton of fruity overtones, but enough. The alcohol is warm but not in your face. It wasn't too dry either, which I'm not crazy about. I'll have to see what a little bottle conditioning will do for the batch. Stay tuned for the report on the 1.07! Cheers.