Post by James DicksonDoes any body have a extract recipe for this Belgium beer
hops? yeast?
Seeing as no one has responded to you yet, I'll shoot, although I have
to preface this with the fact that I've had other St. Bernardus beers,
just not the tripel. The 12 is quite excellent.
Here's a basic extract tripel recipe.
For 5 gallons
9.9 lbs light LME
2 lbs Candy Sugar
10 AAU Tettnager(or any bittering hop, I like Yakima Magnum myself)
boiled 60 min.
.5 oz Saaz boiled 15 min
1 Irish Moss boiled 15 min.
As far as a St. Bernardus tripel clone you may have to do some
experimentation. Often Belgian breweries age their hops and really only
use them for their anti-bacterial properties, they usually use noble
hops only. So whatever hops you use are going to get you close.
WLP530 is the closest yeast strain I've found to the one St. Bernardus
uses. Usually belgian breweries use the same strain for all their beers
so that should be good, if it's not quite what you are looking for you
may have to culture out of the bottle.
Also prime with a whole cup of corn sugar. Belgian beers are fizzy.
Highly alchoholic beers take a while to carbonate so be patient, or
speed up this process by pitching fresh yeast at bottling time and store
the beer at high temps(this is often done in Belgium) until they carbonate.
This will get you very close, however, sometimes belgian breweries add
spices to their beers. Since I haven't had the St. Bernardus you may
have to experiment with that. Michael Jackson says he can taste vanilla,
cookies, and sesame seeds with a tangerine like finish. He also says
that this beer has an orange color. Sometimes yeast can contribute
these flavors.
To get these flavors and color you may want to add a couple ounces of
Chocolate Malt. Possibly a vanilla bean into the secondary(soak in a
little bit of vodka first and put it all into the secondary. Also
possibly one quarter to half an ounce of crushed corriander during the
boil, boiled for 10 minutes.
Well, I hope this all helps. I figure getting some kind of response is
better than none. Perhaps someone more familiar with this particular
beer is yet to reply otherwise you will have to experiment with this.
Either way you really can't fail and unless you really stray far away
the beer you make will turn out great. Just remember that Belgians get
better with age, and usually hit their peak at about 3 years old.
Although I think they are wonderfull after a few months. If you are
impatient, they are still quite good as soon as they are carbonated.