Belgium Trappist Triple - Brupaks Beers of the World

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nick9one1

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I was in my local HBS this weekend and spotted this kit which I hadn't seen before.

I like the more unusual beers, Belgian, Wheat, hoppy american style craft etc. So I thought this would be fun to try.

The kit is quite small (10 litres). But you wouldnt normally drink this beer like a lager so should last quite a while. The kit recommends using smaller 33cl bottles.

Inside the kit you get a tin of extract, yeast, hops (tea bag style), and some begian 'candi' sugar - which looks more like road grit/salt.

I've never before hopped a beer the way this kit instructs. -
Empty the malt extract tin into the fermenter and fill with boiling water, add the candi sugar and hop tea bag. Leave for 15 minutes.
It also recommends making a yeast starter.

Ideally I would have used a smaller fermenter. I did consider dividing it between three demijohns.

After only 8 hours the fermentation was well under way!

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Looks like a healthy brew! Is that your heater mounted vertically I can see in a couple of the images? There have been a number of threads on here pointing out that some types of these should only be mounted horizontally, as mounting them vertically presents a fire risk. Might be worth checking your make/model out, if you haven't already!
 
Thanks for the concern with the heater! You're right, I think pretty much all of these tube heaters say they must be mounted horizontally, not vertically like mine.

But saying that there are a few things you can do to make them safe.

When you mount the heater vertically, the surrounding air that gets heated at the bottom, moves up the tube, getting hotter and hotter. This means the top of the tube gets far too hot as the air it gets has already been heated by the rest of the tube.
when mounted horizontally (like it is designed to be), the warm air rises away from the tube and cooler air is drawn in from underneath.

To get round this I mounted a 180mm computer fan above the horizontal tube. This blows air down and creates a current of air around the fridge. It also has the advantage of keeping the temperature very even. Normally the hot air would accumulate at the top of the fridge and it would be cooler at the bottom.

Also, the heater is attached to a PID which turns it on/off to maintain 20 degrees. With the fridge being sealed and well insulated, it takes very little heat to maintain the temperature, so the heater is turning on very infrequently, and when it does it's only for a minute or two.

I've had this setup for a couple of years and no problems so far.
 
This definitely prefers higher fermenting temperatures. I had it at 19 and it got stuck. I racked it off and bumped it up to 23 and seems to be going well. As its a Belgian, it actually makes sense to ferment it higher.
 
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