Last weekend, I made my first tripel. Although I formulated the recipe on Hopville, which predicted that the beer's color would be 6 SRM (yellow-gold), it actually ended up being about 15 SRM! Does anyone know what would have caused this? Does boiling the sugar or malt for a long period of time make the wort darker?
Fermentables
8 oz. Crystal Malt - 20L
4 oz. Carapils
2 oz. Belgian Aromatic
7# Extra Light DME
1.5# Sugar in the Raw
Hops (whole)
2.5 oz Saaz (3.9 AAU) @ 60min
1 oz Tettnang (3.4 AAU) @ 60min
1 oz Tettnang (3.4 AAU) (3.9 AAU) @ 30min
2 oz Saaz (3.4 AAU) @ 30min
1.5 oz Saaz (3.4 AAU) @ 5 min.
Steeped the grains at 150 for 30 min. 90 minute boil w/ 3 gallons of water.
Yeast
WYEAST 3787 - Trappist High Gravity (w/ 2L starter)
Did you boil all 7#'s of DME for 90 minutes in 3 gallons of water? If so that's probably why it's darker than expected. That's a pretty concentrated wort to boil for that long.
I plan on brewing my first tripel tomorrow based on the recipe from "Brewing Classic Styles." It calls for 10.5 lbs of LME. Since I'm brewing on my stovetop I'm using half the extract and adding the rest at the end of the boil, in the hope of keeping the color light. Even though I split the LME it will probably be darker than expected because I'm using 5 lbs in a partial boil. We'll see how it turns out...
Yes a 90 minute boil will darken the color due to caramelization. Also when calculating make sure you specify your boil volume was 3 gallons.
Using the brewers friend srm calculator http://www.brewersfriend.com/srm-calculator/ I get 12 using cane sugar. They dont have sugar in the raw as an option. Using Belgian candi sugar (amber) brings it up to 24. That assumes a 60 min boil I'm pretty sure.
Yeah,I agree that the 90 minute boil was a bit of overkill here. And I do 3G partial boils,& never use more than 2lbs of DME in them for the hop additions. All the remaining malts at flame out for lighter color & cleaner flavor. I even did my Buckeye Burton ale this way. And it was a 1.065 OG ale that came out at 6.8%ABV.
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Everything works if ya let it-Roady(meatloaf)
What went wrong with my tripel?
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