Belgian Tripel Advice

[quaboagbrewing]

I brewed a 5 gallon Tripel 3 weeks ago based on BYO's Oostmalle Tripel recipe. Primary fermentation is done at this point and trying to decide what to do with respect to conditioning it. I unfortunately don't have a bunch of Belgian Bottles and a floor corker. Just have (12) 16oz FlipTop's and a bunch of standard 22oz bombers if I want to go the bottling route. I also have an available corny keg. If I go the bottling route guessing I'll need to scale back on the c02 volume (believe most tripels call for 3.5 to 4 but that screams bottle bombs in standard 22oz bottles) so I am leaning towards transferring to the corny. If I keg this should I just put a bit of head pressure on the keg and let it age for a while or should I start carbing this immediately? Just looking for some advice. Ideally I'd just age in 750ml Belgian Bottles but can't budget for that right now. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

[jwelch1103]

I carbonate my Tripels to about 2.7 volumes. I use bomber bottles and they are plenty carbonated.

If kegging, I'd force carb the keg right away.

 

[stoneBriar]

A tripel will certainly benefit from some extended bulk aging. You could try keg conditioning. I've had good luck with this for british styles (so much lower carbonation). Use a calculator to determine how much sugar to add to the volume of beer you have to achieve the desired carbonation and toss it in as you keg. Put enough CO2 in the keg to set the lid and stash it in a corner of the house with relatively stable temps. It does not have to be overly warm and you probably want it to take a while to carb up. A keg will hold many times the pressure of what's needed for even the liveliest of beers without fear of a bottle bomb.

Serving a beer that carbonated will be hard without very long keg lines (and even then I bet she foams like crazy).

 

[TastyAdventure]

I have bottled several batches at 3.0-3.1 volumes with regular bottles and no bombs. I think that gets close enough to the high Belgain/Hefeweizen carb levels.