Belgian Trappist Style Ales with Denny Conn – BeerSmith Podcast #340

Brewing author Denny Conn joins me this week to discuss brewing Trappist style Abbey ales including their history, ingredients and brewing techniques used.

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Topics in This Week’s Episode (37:50)

This week I welcome Denny Conn. Denny is a nationally ranked certified beer judge. He is also co-author of the books Simple Homebrewing, Experimental Brewing and also Home Brewing All Stars (All Amazon Affiliate Links).
We start with a discussion of Denny’s 630 batches of beer over a period of 28 years, and how he is brewing a lot of Trappist/Abbey style Belgian ales now.
Denny provides some of the rich history of Trappist ales which originated in Abbeys primarily around Belgium.
We discuss how the International Trappist Ale association now enforces the term Trappist Ale as only applying to a small number of approved Trappist abbeys. So we now instead use the term Abbey ales or perhaps beers brewed in the Trappist style.
Denny explains the basic styles which are single, dubbel, tripel and quad, though there are variations of each.
Denny discusses how these ales often vary by region and color.
We next move to ingredients and how to brew these styles, starting with the malt bill. Denny explains why he prefers to use primarily Belgian pale malts along with a substantial portion of sugars. We also discuss the tradeoffs between simple sugars and expensive Belgian candi sugars.
Denny explains how these beers are simply hopped, often using local hops and also why they are sometimes more bitter than they appear.
We discuss brewing yeasts and Denny provides his favorite yeast to use.
We discuss brewing techniques and in particular how the mash profile is important for achieving a high attenuation in these styles which makes them more drinkable.
Denny provides advice for brewers looking to make the perfect Belgian ale.
He also gives us his closing thoughts.