I love De Halve Maan Straffe Hendrik Wild, so does Simon. It’s a beer we should stock in our house more. We gladly have a crate of Orval or Burning Sky’s Petite Saison on the go every year but only ever have a few bottles of Wild kicking around at any one time. The Wild is a bretted version of the Tripel. We discovered it when we visited the brewery in Bruges. I highly reccommend the tour for the building alone and for how they’ve adapted themselves around it (the beer pipeline is also a hoot). It’s the perfect marriage being able to taste both flavours of the tripel and the brett. It’s something Simon would very much like me to emulate, so why not have 20L of bretted tripel in your house?
I used the Epiphany Tripel recipe as the base from Brew Like a Monk. I fermented initially with WLP500 (I think this is the Chimay strain) and then transferred to a secondary and added Bruxellensis (my favourite brett strain). I was tempted to take half and bottle plain but I didn’t have a 10l demi-john available to put the rest in so hey ho 20l bretted tripel it is!
I’m really pleased with how this has turned out, there’s a lot of funk from the brett and at around 8.5% it’s got the alcohol content of a tripel. I believe Steve from the Beer O’Clock show would describe this as “Belgiany”. It’s Simon’s favourite homebrew so far. My only issue is with the carbonation. I bottled this at the end of August and carbonation has been very slow to develop, not sure if I maybe just miscalculated the sugar addition as I added more yeast at bottling. Despite the low carbonation I do like the flavour so all is not lost.
Have I got brews for you 