Maredsous 10

[Hajimasabi]

While bottling last night we cracked open a Maredsous 10 Triple. We may just be easy to impress, but this beer raised some eyebrows and got me thinking about brewing a clone. Online searches brought up not much, so I've put together a recipe (5gal partial mash) and would like some input. What we liked about M10: high alcohol w/o really tasting it (well masked couldn't believe it was 10%!), complex spicy/fruity flavors bringing to mind cloves, cinnamon and the like, nice head, beautiful almost amber color.

Here's what I have so far:

5 pounds Belgian Pils DME
5 pounds Light DME
.5 pound wheat malt
1 pound Carapils malt, crushed
.25 pounds Belgian aromatic malt, crushed
1 pound table sugar, caramelized into amber syrup
2 ounces Hallertau hops - 60 minutes
2 ounces Styrian Goldings - 60 minutes
2 Liter starter of liquid Belgian Strong Ale yeast (570) or Wyeast(1388)
1 wirlfloc tablet

Questions:
1: Will the wheat malt add anything to head retention if I already have carapils? Would I be better off with flaked wheat or omit it altogether?

2: Will the aromatic malt give me the amber color I'm after without caramelizing the sugar? Will caramelizing add any substantial flavor? Is there a better way to get the amber hue?

3. I have plenty of organic Fuggles. Could they be substituted?

4. Any reason to use both Pilsner and Light DME rather than just 10lb of pils? Most recipes I found seemed to use both.

5. Would I be better off with a Belgian Tripel yeast instead of the strong ale? Which will give the spicier profile?

Many thanks!

 

[Calder]

Never tasted it or seen a recipe, but for a typical trippel, here are my comments. Trippels are about the yeast and dry.

Dump the aromatic and the wheat. Use some wheat DME/LME if you can find it, but only a couple of lbs. About 0.5 lbs aromatic would be right, but it needs to be mashed.

Trippels are generally Pils grains, so you might want to go all Pils.

Does CaraPils need to be mashed? Personally I would leave it out.

Looks like too much hops. Probably want to keep it to around 35 IBUs.

Don't worry about caramalizing the sugar. Belgians just use straight beet sugar in trippels (table sugar).

Increase the sugar to about 2.5 lbs and adjust the extract to get the right OG. Trust me on this, you need to dry out the beer.

You have the right yeast strain. I would guess you want to run it about 75 F. That is the one Duvel uses (I assume you know Maredsous is from Duvel). Once fermentation is over, push the temperature to over 80- to make sure you get everything out of the yeast.

For a trippel you want to end about 1.008. Your OG then should be 1.085 to get 10% abv.

Recommendation: Go to 'The Brewing Network' and go listed to Jamil Zs podcast on brewing Trippels. If you can get past the initial adverts and banter, it has a lot of useful information, and I think they give extract advice too.

 

[Joppo]

Buy the book called BLAM(Brew Like A Monk).
It includes very important information about belgian beers.

Maredsous 10
Malts: Pils and caramel
Adjuncts: Dextrose
Hops: Styrian Goldings, Saaz
Yeast: Duvel (Wyeast 1388)

 

[Hajimasabi]

I thought the hops were a bit high, but using the calculator found here The Beer Recipator 2.2 it was coming out in the high twenties. I must be missing something in the spreadsheet. Based on other recipes, I can cut the hops down to 2oz and it looks like either variety will be fine, I'll probably try the Styrian goldings as I've not used them before.

I'll consider upping the sugar to dry things out as you suggest, but the M10 did seem to have some sweetness and I really liked the amber hue (that's why I'm thinking about caramelizing the sugar). Thanks for the help.