Thanksgiving Tripel

Since I decided to save my yeast cake from batch 28, and since my last attempt at a tripel wasn't terribly successful, I decided to brew up another attempt at the lovely Belgian style again yesterday. The idea is to have it ready by Thanksgiving, hence the name.

The Recipe:

12 lb European Pilsner malt

2 lb granulated white sugar, added with about 20 minutes left in the boil

6 AAU (53g @ 3.2% AA) Tettnanger @ 60
2 AAU (17g @ 3.2% AA) Tettnanger @ 20
2 AAU (17g @ 3.2% AA) Tettnanger @ 5

Whirlfloc tablet @ 15 min

Wyeast 1214 - Belgian Abbey (yeast cake from batch #28); pitched ~200mL of slurry

Mashed at 150° for an hour using 15 quarts of water. Batch-sparged using 170° water and collected 6.5 gallons for the boil.

O.G.: 1.074
Est. IBU: 27.5

Brewing was blissfully uneventful and everything went well. The only disappointment was in the 75% efficiency I got, which, while within the acceptable range, was still a little bit lower than I'd been getting recently. The grind on the grain looked pretty good, so maybe this malt just had lower potential than the estimate I was using for the calculation.

I also racked Proposition 29 to the secondary. I probably could have kegged it, but I don't have any free kegs right now. It got down to 1.007, so about 5.6% ABV, and it has this interesting bright, piney, somewhat citrusy character. It was a pretty clean brew, so I'm thinking that implementing temperature control is going to really pay off for me in my forthcoming brews. I harvested 29's yeast cake as well; I'm thinking of maybe doing a Baltic porter or something.