Making the best of a bad tripel

Brewed a tripel in february, bottled at the end of may. Had some issues while fermenting: Fermentation stalled, i repitched, got it going again, but still stalled out prior to the destination FG. Now its far too sweet and syrupy, i'd imagine due to all those unfermented sugars.

Its not quite UNDRINKABLE, but its certainly not quite ENJOYABLE either. Any suggestions of things to do with it? brew a dry beer and mix it in? im at a loss for ideas here, any help is appreciated!

I'd do some sucrose additions to dry it out, just make sure to keep the sucrose to less than 10% of the total grain bill.

Maybe brew a real dry simple saison using 3711 and then mix the two. I don't know if that will work but that is what I would try.

Had a similar problem with my Trippel. Ended up bottling at around 1.020 because there was little to no yeast activity. I'm hoping that it finds a nice range between carbonating the beer, and blowing up the bottles.....

Let me know what you do and how it turns out.

Cheers!

Add WLP655. Wait 6 months to a year. As long as the original beer wasn't too bitter (<30 IBU-ish) I think it could be really good.

OR

Wait until you have another fresh yeast cake to dump the under-attenuated beer unto. The cake should finish fermenting it.

amylase.

I'd just dump it. I had a similar experience with a brew recently, and with a mile-high list of things I want to try, I saw no reason to keep it around.

I would mix it with a light, 100% base malt beer with the same base malt, hops and yeast. Basicly, instead of a 5 gal Tripel I would make it look like a 10 gal Dubel (or a single-and-half, whatever, lol)

Rinhaak i definately know what you mean, but i find it hard to just dump, especially because it is quite tasty aside from being entirely too sweet!

Scooby Brew! i like the way you're thinking, but would this really help with the sweetness at all? obviously diluting the tripel with a less sweet brew will cut the sweetness, but would it be a negligable amount? what kind of recipe are you thinking?

I don't know what id do with the brew, but I am interested in this thread because I am going to try my first Tripel in about 2 weeks and I want to avoid this happening to me. Why do you think this happened? How much yeast did you pitch? Did you use sugar additions during fermentation? Which yeast did you use? And what were your fementation temp? Sorry but I've never brewed a belgian and I want it to turn out right...

Since it is already in the bottle I'd stick them somewhere warm for a few months and hope for the best. Next time I'd try some other things prior to bottling...Good luck

BTW, what was the OG and FG...and did you pitch yeast at bottling?

Im going to take a guess and say if he was considering mixing it with something that its in a keg

"Im going to take a guess and say if he was considering mixing it with something that its in a keg" bottlebomber

"...bottled at the end of may." OP

I could be wrong.....wouldn't be the first time.....

Ooh yeah missed that. Fail. Cracking open a bunch of bottle and trying to dump them into something else doesn't sound like such a good solution then... +1 to dumping it. I just dumped my first batch ever over the weekend. It hurt as I watched it go down the drain, but I got over it immediately and the bottles were filled with something else by the evening

Good god what is wrong with you dumpers! Beer is never so bad to dump. Ever! I would try to attenuate this further. Un carb it, dump it all into a bucket and seal it with an airlock. Add some white camdi and either a nice starter, or some of a yeast cake.

Its alot of.work, but this is a serious beer we're talking about, and it takes work to get it right.

There's too much great beer out there to waste time with a crappy one... sounds like women doesn't it?

bottlebomber said:

There's too much great beer out there to waste time with a crappy one... sounds like women doesn't it?

Click to expand...

Just like women, even the best require a lot of work. The worst are always just fine in desperate times, they still do the trick! Lol.
Seriously, I will never waste a batch. I don't care what it tastes like, it can be made to be great. Just rename the style! It might not be.what you planned for, but it.can be fixed into a tasty brew. After an arduous brewday and the grainBILL, I don't see the sense in wasting the already accounted for time and money.

If you don't want to try to re-ferment or mix it with something (I wouldn't want to do that either), why not just box it up, stick it away in a dark cool corner of your basement, and try one in about six months? I bottled a strong Belgian ale in January that was absolutely undrinkable in the first few months after bottling. It was hot, like fingernail polish, and sickly sweet. It still wasn't very good as of about a month ago, but it is definitely getting better. I am pretty confident that it is going to be a great beer to drink this winter.

NuclearRich said:

Just like women, even the best require a lot of work. The worst are always just fine in desperate times, they still do the trick! Lol.
Seriously, I will never waste a batch. I don't care what it tastes like, it can be made to be great.

Click to expand...

OK let me dump a tablespoon of bleach into your next batch during primary and you tell me how to fix it.

NuclearRich said:

Seriously, I will never waste a batch. I don't care what it tastes like, it can be made to be great. Just rename the style!

Click to expand...

Im sure my BandAid Brown would have been a huge hit at the homebrew club meeting...

weirdboy said:

OK let me dump a tablespoon of bleach into your next batch during primary and you tell me how to fix it.

Click to expand...

I didn't think of open sabotage... sorry. I just meant that most any beer that has undergone the more natural rigors of less fortunate brewing is salvagable.
Bandaids? Throw it on brandied oak chips and win a competition.

You're going to have to blend it in the glass with something dry, use it for cooking/baking/grilling/marinade/etc., or dump it. There's not really a good solution once it's bottled. Popping open all the bottles and dumping it into another fermenter risks getting that cardboard-oxidation flavor. I'm not saying you couldn't do it but the chance of improving it may not be worth the risk of making it worse. It might be ok if you could siphon out of each bottle. Sounds like a ton of work.

My thought on blending would be to make a 2 or 3 gallon batch of 80% pilsner malt and 20% table sugar with just enough hops to clear 10IBUs and ferment it with champagne yeast. Get it crazy dry. Then bottle it and blend at a ratio of 1/3-1/2 glass dry stuff and the rest of the glass the tripel. Should cut it down.

In the alternative, you could mix it with Coors or Miller (in small amounts) to cut down on the syrupy mouthfeel and sweetness. I know some people will hate on the idea, but it could be done. If you wanted to go the other direction, you could get experimental with blending with mead or champagne.

One other thing to say is that not all tripels are bone dry. Piraat and similar tripels are much more malty and thicker than something like the Chimay tripel. I don't know if you dislike it just because you dislike it or because you thought it was supposed to be dryer because that's what you thought a tripel should be.

NuclearRich said:

Bandaids? Throw it on brandied oak chips and win a competition.

Click to expand...

Oh im sure it would win a competition... if the category was beers that taste like your licking Satans anus.

NuclearRich said:

I didn't think of open sabotage... sorry. I just meant that most any beer that has undergone the more natural rigors of less fortunate brewing is salvagable.
Bandaids? Throw it on brandied oak chips and win a competition.

Click to expand...

Oakey bandaids yeah I think I will pass and have a beer I actually enjoy drinking. Same goes for contaminated beers. Just dump it for crying out loud. I would rather just brew something else that I will enjoy drinking.

Bandaid brown definitely makes my recent failure (which is closer to cardamom extract than beer) look like a winner!

A while back I brewed a Triple that was stuck at 1.020 which resisted all my attempts to mitigate the fermentation. I'm not so anal about most of my beers but I get a little perfectionist with the Triples...I was about to dump it when the wife convinced me to bottle it and give it time...and this from a women with zero patience who would drink it out of the bucket if I let her. Anyway...I bottled it and stuck it out of sight for 5 months and it became one of my all time favorite Triples. Go figure.

With my trippel I'm still waiting on carbonation, but putting it in the bottles sense to have really changed the taste. Hoping that a good couple of months will make this an excellent beer. No exploding bottles just yet and slight carbination. May end up throwing in those carbination pills or repitching a yeast with a higher alcohol tolerance.

DTM84 said:

With my trippel I'm still waiting on carbonation, but putting it in the bottles sense to have really changed the taste. Hoping that a good couple of months will make this an excellent beer. No exploding bottles just yet and slight carbination. May end up throwing in those carbination pills or repitching a yeast with a higher alcohol tolerance.

Click to expand...

Are you suggesting opening bottles and pitching yeast into them?

ReverseApache, Trust me, i've had many many tripels of all sorts and this one just isnt doing it. Its less about preference and more about execution.

For whoever had asked, i think what i did wrong was move it to a secondary a bit preemptively. i took it off the original yeast that was best suited to do the fermenting, and then all was weird after that. even pitched a new yeast and everything and after 3 months of waiting, simply could not get the beer to hit the FG i was looking for. I cant remember what it was supposed to be, but the OG was something like 1.09 Figured i'd bottle and hope for the best.

I've certainly got some time so i'll let it sit for quite some time and hopefully mellow it out. though i do like the idea of brewing something light with a mead or champagne yeast and combining the two

bottlebomber said:

Are you suggesting opening bottles and pitching yeast into them?

Click to expand...

Na. They have carbonating pills that you toss into individual beers and cap.