Carbing And Bottling A Belgian Tripel

Thanks for all of your answers and advice. It is greatly appreciated.

I'll be brewing a Belgian tripel this week and had some questions about how to properly carb it and how I should bottle it when it is ready in a few weeks.

The guy at my LHBS sold me a sachet of Red Star pasteur champagne yeast. He advised that I add a few granules of the yeast to each bottle when bottling and that would produce the tiny bubbles associated with a tripel. Should I do this with the champagne yeast in place of using priming sugar? Should I be using any priming sugar to carbonate my beer or will the champagne yeast handle all of that? If I should use priming sugar should I use less than I normally would?

My second issue is with "how" I bottle this batch. I have seen tripels in normal bottles with a cap on it but my guy advised me to consider corking it and using Belgian bottle wires because of the pressure that will build up. I would prefer to not shell out extra cash for Belgian bottles, corks and wires. If I were to use normal bottles and caps are there any additional steps I can take to reinforce the caps and the seal? What if I were to fill the bottles a half inch less than I normally do?

Thanks again for your help!
Duffman53

I'm on my second batch of triple and both have turned out excellent. You can use the bottles and cork them like the commercial beers but I bottled normally and used priming sugar with no problem. It all depends how much work you want to put into it.

As long as you don't go crazy with the priming sugar, you can bottle in regular bottles. I usually carb my tripel to about 3 volumes and have never had any problems with bottle bombs.

I also wouldn't use champagne yeast. I'd be worried it would consume additional sugars the primary yeast did not, which when coupled with added priming sugar would result in either overcarbed bottles or bottle bombs. When i add extra yeast i usually just toss a pack of t-58 into my bottling bucket. I haven't had any problems getting them to carb up this way.