Rick Derris Wrote:
Geek time. Can one of you explain to me the difference between a Witbier and a Tripel?
Just brew methods?
They seem pretty similar.
I can take a stab at it, but I don't know a shitload.
First it might help to just make sure you clear on the basic process that happens to make any beer:
1. You take barley and maybe wheat or other grains, but primarily barley, and you roast them dry for awhile. It's like coffee - if you don't roast them much they stay blonde and light, but if you roast for a long time you get dark dark brown grain that tastes more like burnt toast. Almost all beers have a mixture of different grains and roasts. More of these make a more complex tasting, fuller flavor beer. Using a lot of rice in the mix makes Bud Light... rice is cheap and it ferments without adding much flavor.
2. So then you take your mixture of grains and hops and you boil it in water at a certain temp for an hour or two. That takes these raw grains and starts to break them down - literally - into starches and sugars that the yeast looooove to eat. If you just threw yeast into a big tub of raw grain and water, not much would happen. This gets the party started. About the hops - if you put them in early, the sweeter, pinecone / green flavors tend to boil off and they taste a lot more bitter. If you dump them in at the last second before you shut the heat off, then they taste like Sierra Nevada IPA... pinecone green floral happyland smell. Most beers do some of both, and crazy hoppy beers will sometimes do a "continual hop" where they add hops throughout the whole burn, slowly and evenly, so you get the whole flavor spectrum.
3. Once the "wort" is cool, like down to 70 degrees or so, you dump in a bunch of yeast who are all riled up and looking to party. They're competing with bacteria in the air, so you stack the odds by getting them woken up first, and by putting a shitload of them in so they overpower any bacteria and take over the scene. Once they start eating those starches and sugars, they multiply and start pooping out 2 things: Carbon dioxide and alcohol.
4. This goes on for a month or two til the yeast are all done eating, fucking, and pooping. Then they crash on the couches at the bottom of the barrel, close the blinds, crank the AC to "SO COLD" and take a long nap. At this point you can filter, bottle, keg, whatever the beer. It's flat, so it needs carbonation somehow, but that's another topic. But it's beer at this point.
Ok so your question... Belgians like Witts and Dubbels and Tripels taste like they do because of a few common tricks the monks do. First the strain of yeast you use has a big impact on the final flavor. Some taste buttery, or lemony, or like bubblegum and bananas. And some are better at eating and fucking and pooping - they're more efficient than other strains. If you use a less efficient yeast, then the alcohol content will be lower, and the beer will taste sweeter. But using really efficient (same kind used to make champaign actually) yeast like the belgians tend to do, you get a stronger beer that tastes less sweet. So that's one trick. Another is adding certain other kinds of sugar to the wort... cheating if you will. They use a lot of beet sugars, and refined candy sugar. And the yeast LOVE that shit - so they gobble it up and poop out lots of booze, but you can't overdo it because the beer starts tasting like rubbing alcohol. Another thing they do is leave the yeast in the beer, instead of filtering it all out. That leaves the beer cloudy, and leaves it tasting a lot more like yeast.
Wittbier is a light colored, sweetish belgian beer that's completely unfiltered, I think. It's only fermented once, it has a modest alcohol content, and goes fucking great with an orange slice. They taste like they do because of lightly roasted malts, the particular yeast and hops they use, and the not filtering thing. That's all I know.
Dubbels and Tripels are fermented twice and three times, respectively. So back up there in the instructions, you've cooked up your barley and hops, cooled it, added yeast, and they're all done and crashed out on the floor of the barrel, snoozing. Then you open the lid and dump in more fuel for them - more barley, or even fruits all cooked and mashed up... anything sugary is probably a-ok with the yeast - they'll take a swing at eating it, and anything they can't eat will survive through to the final beer unless it gets filtered out. So in almost the same volume of liquid, you've got yeast who have been fed two or three times, which makes the alcohol content creep up. Or, the first go-round was with regular beer yeast, and they got it up to 5% and were all done. Then you open it up and dump in special high-efficiency yeast (champaign, Bretanomyces or however you spell it, etc)... these new guys look around and see a table full of sweet delicious scraps that the beer yeast couldn't eat, and they go nuts and get the alcohol up to 9 or 10%. Shit like that. Dubbels and Tripel are usually filtered, I think??? But maybe not always.
