What is a TRAPPIST SINGEL (Patersbier) and why you NEED TO BREW IT

what's going on everybody welcome back to another video today we are going to be brewing a belgian beer that is definitely not the most popular one out there not the most interesting necessarily but it is one of the most flavorful and enjoyable belgian beers there are and that is the potter's beer so potter's beer also known as trappist single is a beer that is really quite hard to find in most cases uh like an authentic trap a single an authentic patrick's beer usually is only found at the actual abbeys themselves potter's beer literally means father's beer in dutch this means that this is the beer that the monks brew for themselves to actually drink and enjoy the monks aren't getting trashed off of 10 belgian quads they are sitting there enjoying their five percent potter's beers with a meal perhaps the high abv beers that they sell at the abbeys primarily are to help fund the abbeys and help bring money into the trappist order so some examples of beer are things like chameleore or the west veteran six what it is at its core is a trappist beer with all of the same complexity and intensity of flavors and that's very special abby east you get out of things like doubles triples and quads but without the massive kick of alcohol on top of it this makes it a great way to have more than one of these things and really enjoy the special trappist flavors so that's what we're doing today we are brewing up this trappist single this potter's beer and we're aiming for about a five percent alcohol beer that has pretty much all of the same exact characteristics you would expect out of a triple these beers are traditionally produced through a method known as party guiling which is really seldom used outside of the monasteries nowadays um but it's a it's an interesting technique where you kind of get two beers off of the same mash so you conduct your mash and then you have your first runnings which is the first draw of liquid off of the mash the first runnings have very high gravity usually that becomes the strong beer then after that you add more water to it you sparge basically and the second runnings will come out with a much lower gravity than the first once you go through the process of making both of these beers you have a strong beer and you have a light beer a small beer it's actually what it's called and that's usually how these are made so typically these are going to be coming off of a double triple or quad mash and then you get some of the same characters of those high gravity beers in this low gravity beer the party island method is interesting and it's on my list of things to try out i'm not going to be doing it here today though because this beer today is something you can very much easily do as its own standalone mash its own standalone beer so that's what we're doing today it's well worth brewing on its own just because it is so interesting before we jump into the recipe though i do want to thank a few organizations for helping make this video possible firstly northern brewer thank you for providing the ingredients for this batch and go check them out they're no longer owned by inbev it's a great place to get your ingredients your equipment and also knowledge about home brewing if you're just starting out they're good guys they will help you out quite a bit tell them i sent you secondly clawhammer supply they make the system i've been brewing on for the last basically year and a half now and it is a fantastic system it's available in both 120 and 240 volt options for your electric brew house check them out they also have a fantastic youtube channel i'm sure you know about that so check all that stuff out all right so now let's jump into the recipe we're aiming for about a four and a half to five percent beer so uh not too much grist going into this we're using eight pounds of franco belgius pilsner malt which is probably one of the best belgian pilsner malts you can get then on top of that routing only half a pound of aromatic malt kind of gives a little bit of extra complexity and a little depth of flavor to the whole thing alternatively you can use biscuit malt or munich malt perhaps if you want slightly different character but aromatic mold is kind of like vienna malt on steroids and on top of it we're gonna add one pound of golden candy syrup so i've been using simplicity the the clear candy sugar uh for a while in most of my belgians but i wanted to try out this golden candy syrup it has a slight bit of color to it five srm um and supposedly has a little bit more of a flavor complexity than your typical simplicity serve so i'm hoping that does come through one of the big pieces of feedback that i got out of my nhc submissions of the belgians is that they needed more sugar complexity in them so that's what i'm hoping to achieve here with this one alternatively if you want to darken the beer bit you can use something like the d45 candied sugar which is another option just going to give you a little bit more darkness in the beer for our hops we're going to be using mostly haller town a little bit of syrian goldings so i'm using halital mittelfur we're going to put one ounce of halotown middle fire in at 60 one ounce at 15 and then we're gonna do a five minute addition with the steering goldings just one ounce of that as well for our water profile now i'm actually going to be making a bit of a change uh to the usual and uh we're going to be mixing the sodium bicarbonate edition that i was adding in before kind of someone brought up yeah it doesn't really make that much sense that i'm adding sodium bicarbonate and then adjusting my mashed ph lactic acid later like yeah that makes sense so i mixed it uh so now we are aiming for a slightly different water profile 75 parts per million of calcium seven parts per milliliter of magnesium zero parts per million of sodium 105 pies per million of chloride 62 parts per milliliter sulfate and zero parts per million of bicarbonate and in order to get that water profile you're going to add 2 grams of gypsum 2 grams of epsom and 5 grams of calcium chloride to the strike water this is about eight gallons of distilled water that i'm using for strike water and um that should get you where you need to be for our yeast in this one we're gonna go back with what is probably my favorite yeast out of the whole bunch that i've been playing around with lalamand abbey it's a dry yeast and it was entirely responsible for making my triple taste so good so i'm hoping that that's going to have a similar effect in the potter's beer we're going to pitch one packet of flowermount abilities for our mash we want this to be a well attenuated beer rather dry at the ends but not too dry and still have a massive head on it as is traditional with all belgian beers we're going to start with a 45 minute rest at 148 we're going to step up to 158 for another 45 minutes we'll do a mash out at 170 for 15 minutes in the past that's created some very nice fermentable warts light bodied with a good level of head retention that's what we want but also having some sugar complexity in there as well all right with that all out of the way let's jump into the brew day i added eight gallons of spring water to my 10 gallon claw hammer supply 240 volt system and started to heat it up to the mash temperature i also milled all my grain at this time once the water had reached the mash in temperature i mashed in and i started to recirculate the mesh [Music] after about 10 minutes of this i took a ph reading and i saw a ph in the mash of 5.75 which is far too high so to correct this i added about a cap full of lactic acid to bring it back down to something far more reasonable once the mash rested at 148 for 45 minutes i raised it up to 158 for 45 more minutes and then i lastly raised it up to the mash out step of 170 and let it rest for 15 minutes at that step at that time then i pulled out the grain basket and let it drain again for about 15 minutes but while i did this i set the controller to maintain a temperature just below boiling to prevent a boil over while my basket was draining once that had finished i removed the basket and i set the controller to only about fifty percent power to maintain a good rolling boil at this time i added in my 60 minute addition with one ounce of halotown metal proof [Music] now let's boil continue for 45 minutes and then i added my 15 minute hop addition one ounce more of how a talmud [Music] i also added a world flock tablet and a little bit of yeast nutrient at this time ten minutes later i added my five minute hop addition one ounce of styrian goldens five minutes after that i entered the boil and then i began to chill everything down to the pitching temperature of about 65 fahrenheit and that transferred to the fermenter i took an og sample using my anton par easy dance and i saw an original gravity of 1048 at this point i pitched one packet of lalamand abbey into the anvil bucket fermenter and i left it to ferment [Music] [Music] next step we'll talk about fermentation for this particular beer the fermentation on this is what makes it what it is all belgians are built through the fermentation the yeast is incredibly important and the selection of it can make a big difference in how your beer tastes at the end of the day as well as the fermentation temperature the pitch rate the level of variation all of that good stuff and even the shape of your fermenter what we are going to be doing today though is pitching one packet of almond abile yeast this is a really simple easy way to get a significant amount of yeast into your beer to allow it to ferment quickly and healthy as well so i'm only pitching a single packet of yeast into this rather standard gravity work which is actually a pretty significant pitch rate as a result having more yeast in the fermentation means that there's definitely a chance that there's going to be a lower level of esters and a lower level of fermentation character in general that being said if you're using a liquid yeast packet that might give you a slightly different result with more fermentation character because it's a slightly lower pitch rate in this beer style you can really get away with a lot of different yeast though you can either use an abbey strain like i'm using or you can use a golden strong ale strain like yes 1388 or you can use the very famous arden strain the lachouffe strain which is another great option for this type of beer if however you're trying to emulate a a specific trappist monasteries postures beer you're going to probably want to choose the yeast from that particular monastery if it's available basically you have plenty of different options there all of these are going to give you slightly different yeast characteristics some might be more esterry some might be more phenolic some might just be balanced so that depends on what you like in the beer secondly the other thing you're going to want to do is tweak your fermentation temperature if you want more esters ferment it warmer if you want less fermented colder so belgian yeasts are typically going to give you pear and bubble gum esters sometimes a little bit of banana and they're going to give you spicy clove phenols as well as white pepper and sometimes a little bit of coriander kind of complexity in there depending on what temperature you ferment it typically though these belgians are really going to want to get nice and warm so what i like to do for most of my belgians is start them out about 68 degrees fahrenheit off of the pitch let it go up to whatever temperature it wants to naturally rise up to during fermentation it's going to produce its own heat inside the fermenter to warm itself up that can actually on its own get the temperature of the beer all the way up into the 80s if it goes unsuppressed again with the spear being such a low gravity relative to the other high gravity trappist styles that i've been making i do expect there's going to be less ester activity so i'm going to let this thing get as warm as it really wants to and maybe encourage it a little bit go up to about 77 degrees i think is as high as i'd comfortably kick this i let my triple go up to 75 with this yeast and it was full of character so going a little higher than that with a higher pitch rate might make just enough difference i wouldn't recommend fermenting these under pressure because you're gonna probably end up suppressing the yeast character of the beer itself uh which is the primary source of flavor so it could end up becoming a little less uh intense in terms of fermentation character than it was designed to be if you ferment under pressure but that being said plenty of people still do it so i mean go for it if you feel like it and also wouldn't recommend using kvik for this style either it's going to be very very different it's not a belgian yeast it doesn't produce those same esters and phenols so you're not going to have the same character at all it would end up tasting more like a regular old morning pale ale i think if you did kvike or something more tropical and new world american pale ale style so what i'm going to be doing in a nutshell is pitching one packet of lalamand abbey yeast into the wort at about 68 fahrenheit and letting it naturally free rise up to probably about 77 fahrenheit no higher and fermenting it there probably for about five to ten days the fermentation should be really quick it's a low gravity beer it's a lot of yeast it's a high fermentation temperature and that should really finish it out pretty fast so i wouldn't be surprised if it was done within two weeks and it shouldn't really require any aging so i should be able to package it up and enjoy it right after that uh so looking forward to it i'll catch you guys then fermentation was completed probably relatively quickly but i was actually away from home for a long time several weeks and this beer actually ended up sitting in the fermenter for pretty much an entire month before i was able to keg it it got relatively warm in the fermenter based on my ink bird it reached a max of about 78 fahrenheit just to do the natural heat of the fermentation so it probably was done in about a week i saw a final gravity of 1008 when i kegged and that gives us an apparent attenuation of 79 percent the beer is called tiny monk and it comes in at 5.1 percent abv and 31 ibus all right so for the appearance of the beer it is pouring a lovely really kind of dark gold color bordering on orange very similar color to the triple actually just a little bit lighter i think in my opinion it's not exactly as clear as the pilsner i just made but it's pretty clear there's a very very very subtle haze to it but most of it's just yeast in suspension that's already pretty much lagered out as far as the head on the beer it's pouring with a sort of cream-colored head it sticks around for a decent period of time but doesn't have truly incredible head retention like some of the other trappist beers that i've made it does however have very good lacing all in all it's a pretty pleasing beer to look at it's kind of nice to see that carbonation coming up through it so also very nice to break out the spencer brewing glass i haven't brought that out in a long time and it's kind of a good reminder of you know a fantastic brewery that once was spencer trappist dales had to close their doors earlier this year so this is kind of in memory to them spencer was the only trappist monastery in the united states that produced beer now let's move on to aroma it's a pretty highly aromatic beer with a lot of notes of orange and a little bit of honey as well just like it's it's got that wildflower honey that orange blossom honey almost um that it really does feel very similar to the triple in terms of aroma i'm getting a good amount of spice as well i think it's like a corny underspice but overall very aromatic beer very inviting let's accept that invitation and go in for mouthfeel mouth feels light it's a light bodied beer it has some edge to it which i'm kind of surprised about actually but overall it's very highly drinkable it's very sessionable it's definitely not a soft mouthfeel but it's definitely not hard either it's just kind of has that edge carbonation is definitely there it's pretty highly carbonated overall i mean i kind of do that intentionally for the belgian styles they're supposed to be higher carbonation levels and it definitely affects the mouth feel as well it's pretty dry too it's not exactly says on dry though but i think it's as far as dryness it's where it should be the mouth feels a little bit on the edgy side so now let's go in for flavor it's a good beer i'll tell you that much it's a very very drinkable beer coming in at five and a half percent it really does feel very similarly to the triple um it tastes very similarly to the triple more specifically it has those notes of honey and orange and coriander and lavender and chamomile that really were in the triple one more thing to note though is this is definitely a lot less sweet than uh the triple was and i think the extra four percent alcohol relative from this beer to that beer uh is definitely a player in the perceived sweetness of that beer um this is relatively similar and definitely feels a lot less sweet there's one thing though that is a little bit more pronounced in this particular brew versus the triple and that is bubble gum the beer is pretty heavily yeast driven which explains a lot of the esters on this one specifically to my taste though this does feel a lot more estery than i would have preferred and it's just kind of my own palette talking here but i would have preferred a little bit more of a phenolic taste to this something a little bit more clovy a little bit more spicy a little bit more peppery also the maltiness on this is uh it's very one-dimensional it's definitely good it's it's got this kind of bready doughy kind of character but it's not really the crisp crackeriness that i think i was envisioning maltiness on this is coming through primarily as like a bready doughy character it's pretty full and rich i would say but still relatively sessionable and drinkable this really does feel like a five and a half percent version of the nine percent triple um it's very similar in flavor it's not quite the same thing it's got a little bit more ester a little bit less malt character but it's overall still a pretty good beer so now let's talk about the potential improvements on this one first of all i really think i would have preferred a more phenolic fermentation character in this so it's very estuary it actually initially was very aptly but after about three weeks of conditioning time it actually turned out to be more like a pear character over time which is good i like the pear a lot more than the apple i think it was a little bit of acetaldehyde but anyway the point is though this is actually a very s3 beer that bubble gum character is a high ester it kind of signifies a higher fermentation temperature there's just really no phenolics in this i would have preferred a beer that had more phenolics more clove more coriander more spice to it maybe some peppery kind of notes as well and i think that's something i would have changed in a rebrew so maybe adding in a different strain of yeast perhaps something a little bit more phenolic or fermenting at a lower temperature between 65 to 68 degrees perhaps that would encourage more production of phenols secondly the malt character in this is leaving some things to be desired in you know in terms of my personal palette so both of those improves really are based on my own personal tastes it has nothing to do with whether or not the beer is good the beer is good um but it all depends on what you like do you like estuary beers or do you like phenolic beers if you like balance beers i prefer balance beers the second thing i would really improve though is that malt character it's very doughy it's very bready it's it's not exactly what i want out of it i want more of a crisp crackery pilsner character belgian pilsner malt is definitely notoriously more bready than german pilsner malt so perhaps i would add in some german or bohemian pilsner malt to get that effect i think a german pilsner malt gives you that hay like crackery like subtly honey sweet like character that would really really do uh wonders for making the base of this beer something completely different so that's kind of really my recommends on this one it's kind of nitpicky it really is it's a good beer it's it's very enjoyable it's my wife's favorite beer that i've made this year so far so that's kind of a win too and at the end of the day it's still a very highly flavorful and aromatic beer that is a joy to drink there is something to be said about having a trappist ale that has all of the full flavors of a trappist triple but in a lower abv package with a beer like this it's so nice to have such a rich complex flavor and you can actually have two or three of them without getting completely completely trashed like you would with a nine percent 10 11 triple overall though i'd say this is a great success i'm very happy with the way this beer turned out it's definitely one of my favorites in the lineup so far and i hope you enjoy the video as much as i've enjoyed this beer if you did please go ahead hit that like and comment and subscribes buttons if you haven't already i really do appreciate the comments though i love reading the comments and talking with people about beer it is one of my favorite things to do one of my favorite parts of this channel if you want to support the channel there's a number of ways to do so i do recommend checking out the t-shirt store check out the patreon if you're inclined check out the channel memberships if you're inclined or hit the super thanks button if you feel like it all of these are great ways to help support me and i do really appreciate all of it i also have an amazon store in the description box where you can find a lot of the recommended brewing equipment that i use on the regular and i stand behind if it's available on amazon it's on that list go check it out if you're interested please feel free to also follow me on facebook and instagram at the apartment brewer if you want some more frequent content besides youtube either way guys i really appreciate you sticking around to the end means a lot to me so until the next one cheers you

Channel: TheApartmentBrewer

Views: 14,338

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Id: S6h7czkLb40

Length: 22min 6sec (1326 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 26 2022