so I was thinking about brewing a belgium beer. if it was a dubbel, tripel or quad, to stay true to the style doesnt that mean that for a dubbel you use double the malt, tripel you use tripple the malt and quads use 4x the malt?
while some will disagree, the terms double, tripel and quad do not really have anything to do with the malt bill. if i remember correctly, these terms most likely come form the alcohol content. to achieve higher abv's in both tripels and quads, yes more grain will be required to get your OG up, but this is most likely purely coincidental. in addition most trips and quads have some sort of sugar content in them, especially trips who use large amounts of sugar (up to 20% of the bill) to dry them out. ps, not to be a grammar jerk but, Belgium is the country, Belgian is the descriptor for their beer or waffles ect...
Not quite. Dubbel should be 6-7%. Tripel 8-9%. Quad 10%+. http://www.bjcp.org/2008styles/style18.php#1b I think the Quad would fall under the Belgian Dark Strong category in the BJCP guidlines.
There is certainly quite a bit of overlap for abv in commercial examples though - and I think most dubbels I have had are 7-8% to be honest, despite what BJCP says (just take a look at these). Tripels and quads will typically overlap in abv as well. It seems very typical for dubbels and quads to be dark while tripels are routinely light however there is also exceptions to that rule in commercial examples (Gulden Draak calls itself a dark tripel). Here is a tidbit - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripel#History' As you can see, they are simply theories, the true origins of the terms are lost to time I suppose.
