Style School: Belgian Tripel

A 20th-century invention made famous by monks, this strong but elegant ale of hospitality is built from the simplest of ingredients—yet it’s among the most challenging to brew well. Jeff Alworth explains its origins and context.

CALL TO MIND A

Belgian tripel, and two images are likely to appear: The first is a goblet of liquid gold, bubbling like a cauldron, topped with a head of snow; the second is a monk moving deliberately among brewery vessels in meditative concentration. Both reveal something essential about the development of this classic style. The question of color fixes the style in time, as does the image of those credited with first brewing it.

As Belgian styles go, tripels are not especially old, dating to fewer than 90 years ago. Until well into the 20th century, Belgium’s barley-based ales tended heavily toward amber and brown, colors that signal full, rich flavors. As in neighboring Germany, drinkers seeking pale beers often turned to wheat. (Compared to the deeper color of barley beers, they looked white or “wit.”) Brewing strong ales of pale color was flirting with gimmickry, and the early examples in the 1930s remained curiosities for decades. Nevertheless, the people most responsible for popularizing tripel—the Trappist monks of Westmalle Abbey—saw the future of beer, even if it took a long time coming. And because they were patient, they had time to refine their unusual beer, preparing it for the moment flaxen Belgian ales would supplant brown ones.

Double Ales, Yes. But Triple?

A pub-goer in 19th century Belgium would be familiar with “double” beers (or “dubbel,” in Dutch). Beers such as uytzet and gerst and Diest all came in ordinary and strong versions. The “double” in the title may have seemed slightly mysterious to drinkers, but to brewers it referred to process. It indicated gravity, but not in the way our 21st century brains might imagine. In a modern brewery, the way to moderate a beer’s strength is via the amount of malt in the grist. The difference between a session and imperial IPA is a matter of pounds.

To our eyes, the Belgian brewing process of that time would appear strange and convoluted. Brewers used odd vessels, pans, and paddles to mash their beer—a process that took hours. Governments taxed brewers based on the size of their mash tuns rather than how much beer they made, so most had small vessels, tightly packed with grain. Instead of mashing and rinsing the grist with water, they steeped and then drained the tun, repeating the process multiple times, drawing off weaker worts each time—something like very elaborate batch-sparging. For the popular uytzet style, for example, brewers drew four or five worts off the same mash; they combined the first two in the kettle to make double uytzet, while the remaining worts made the ordinary version. So “double” didn’t so much mean the strength of the beer as the relative gravity of a given wort.

I have encountered no mention of tripels before the 20th century. Brewing wasn’t as efficient then as it is now, and high-gravity beers were less common. George Lacambre, the brewing scientist writing in the mid-19th century, documented two dozen Belgian beers, and the strongest were about 19˚ Plato (1.078), but these all-malt beers were poorly attenuated, finishing at 8–9˚ Plato (1.032–1.036). It would have been more expensive to make a “triple-strength” beer, but brewers using only the first wort might have pushed the gravity high enough. Most double ales were specialty or export beers. If anyone made a tripel, it would have been special indeed.

Enter Westmalle

By the 20th century, breweries understood more about chemistry and yeast—and they had begun to add easily fermented sugar to their kettles as well. Brewers at Drie Linden were selling a tripel-strength beer then called Witkap Pater by 1932, and Westmalle soon followed with its “Superbier.” A chemist and fermentation expert named Hendrik Verlinden owned

To our eyes, the Belgian brewing process of that time would appear strange and convoluted. Brewers used odd vessels, pans, and paddles to mash their beer—a process that took hours.