Tripel Karmeliet Clone

Last friday it was time to bre a Triple Karmeliet clone. This beer was brought to my attention by Rui Gil, and it was a complete surprise, one of the best blonde beers I've ever had. Once again the folks at http://cervejartesanal.com had a all grain recipe ready, so no calculations, no leftovers, just buy and brew =)



The grain was previously crushed when we brew the Blue Chimay clone, so when we arrived at around 18:30 we started eating the water, and as soon as it reached 68º we turned off the heat and added the grains.

We kept monitoring the temperature, and it was a bit too high for the first 15 minutes. Being afraid of having a too high temperature for mashing, I added a bit of water to lower the temperature. Got it to 66º and let stay that way almost until the end. The last 15 minutes the temperature had dropped to 62º so I turned on the heat until it got to 65 again.

After mashing, time for sparging. I read quite a bit since my last brew, and Alex gave me some nice tips as well, so one of the errors with the previous brew was adding the sparge water too quickly. This time I decided to do it very slowly.

Using the base of the graduated cylinder we added water very slowly, as the wort was being extracted also very slowly. This process took around 40 minutes and we never let liquid level below the grains.

If you look closely at the previous picture you can see we managed to get the top with clear water. This means we were extracting the wort very slowly, and adding water to compensate what was being extracted. The following picture shows exactly how cleat was the top of the tun.

Time for boiling, my favourite part due to the incredible smells of the hops and spices we add. The recipe had 6 hop additions at different times, plus 3 spices, so it was cool to set the alarms for the exact time to add every ingredient. There was a problem with the ingredients, I believe they forgot to send all the coriander seeds since there was only a small 2g packet. It's quite a lot less than the recipe, let's see if it makes a strong difference.

Some of the hops were dried, some were pellets. For some reason I feel like cheating while using pellets, but after reading a bit there's not a clear difference between both in terms of flavours and both have advantages.
After all the ingredients, this was what it looked like:

The golden stuff at the top is not a thin sheet of gold, as the British Royalty used on the drinks for the king, it's actually orange peel.
After boiling, time for filtering once more, and I must confess the result at this point was amazing. Incredible smell and just look at the colour:

Since I still do not have a wort cooler, same process was used as with the chimay, let it cool overnight and add the yeast the day after. I used the Wyeast XL yeast, the kind you don't need to make a started, and unlike the chimay the result has been a very strong bubbling and a very strong smell as well, had to keep the door closed since Ana was already complaining =) The cat seemed to like it though..

Now comes the hard part, waiting... I'll keep you posted about the results.