IPA Update

Yesterday ended up getting away from me, and I could not get to the brew shop to pick up the barleywine ingredients I needed to brew today. Or to BJ's to fill the gas cylinder. Or to the supermarket to get the water. Sigh...hey, sometimes there are more important things than brewing. I know, I know hard to believe but true. So I got that all together today with the intention of having an evening brew session but once everything was said and done I didn't feel the desire. It would have all been too rushed. So I'm brewing tomorrow. It should go quickly as I'm only making 3 gallons and it's an extract w/ steeped grain recipe. Plus my yeast starter can use the time to kick into higher gear.

Since I had to do something brewish yesterday I decided to bottle the IPA (finally!). So here's the final (okay, penultimate) assessment:


Color: Close to a Sierra Nevada Anniversary Ale. My to-be-carbonated "new beer" is on the left, the Sierra Nevada (which I just happened to be drinking last night) is on the right.

FG: 1.013 for an ABV of 6.96% - call it 7%

Aroma: Pleasant but not overbearing cascade aroma - floral, citrusy, just a bit spicy.

Taste: There is an assertive (but not overly so) bitterness that gives way to a mild grapefruit taste at the finish. Your taste buds are left vibrating slightly from it, but it is by no means harsh or unpleasant. I made this recipe from a similar one I tried some years back. That beer turned out way out of balance, and drinking it was akin to having your tongue flattened out by a bitter, grapefruit flavored Louisville Slugger. I was worried that this may come out the same, but it most certainly did not. I'll get a more thorough taste report when it's finally carbonated.

Overall: I love this beer. I was "eh" over the Porter, (though I've had my local homebrew shop owner confirm it was just fine), but this has (thus far) turned out better than I thought it would...by far. Assuming it doesn't go to hell in the bottle, this one is a keeper - something to use as a standard as time goes on and watch it improve as I do.

As a note, I had a small disaster dry-hopping. The bag ruptured putting half the hops (and marbles for weighting the bag) outside the fermenter. So I didn't get as much in the fermenter as I wanted to. Turns out, it may have just been enough. We'll see. I also had a lucky break when I set my racking cane down on the ruptured bag to rack the beer to the bottling bucket, as the torn bag acted as an additional filter preventing sediment from transferring.


Since I also used gelatin as a clarifier I'm wary that there might not be a lot of yeast sediment that transferred and the beer will carbonate slowly, but I don't think that will be much of an issue. It's a nylon straining bag and not a micron filter, and I plan on letting this stuff sit several weeks before trying. I also need to think through a better mechanism for dry-hopping than filling a straining bag with whole hops and sanitized marbles and trying to force it into the carboy.


There they are...well, half of them. 12 x 22oz bottles. I also have one case of 12 oz bottles and one 16 oz swing top. Not a bad haul. I marked an "I" on the caps so they are not confused with their friends the porter bottles.

At Long Last - The Tale of the IPA

I'm really not keeping this up like I want to, but sometimes you just can't. So here I am now; I finally got around to brewing my IPA on 01 February, aka Superbowl Sunday. I got much more out of my brewing experience that day than I did the Superbowl, which I tried to get officially re-named "Who Gives a Rat's Ass" since the Patriots weren't in it.

In the interest of keeping the learning curve steep, I stepped up to partial mashing. I was happy with how I handled the nuts and bolts of boiling, adding hops, cooling and racking, so I figured I'd up the difficulty.

First, the recipe (I make 6 gallons to end up bottling 5):

3.5 lbs American Pale Malt
1 lb Crystal Malt 20°L
0.5 lb Victory Malt
6 lbs Munton's Extra Light DME
0.75 oz Chinook 13%AA - 60 min boil
0.75 oz Cascade 7.4%AA - 60 min boil
0.75 oz Cascade 7.4%AA - 15 min boil (flavor)
0.5 oz Cascade 7.4%AA - end of boil (aroma)
0.75 oz Cascade 7.4%AA - Dry Hop (add to secondary)

Predicted OG is 1.066, 60 IBU (BU/GU ratio is 0.91 - pretty hoppy)

I've read some bad things about Chinook hops - too resiny, too piney, blah blah blah. I have used them in the past and found that if I stay under an ounce and make sure I have a good, vigorous boil, I get good results.

I mashed in a min-mash bucket that I lined with a 24" x 24" mesh bag. Once I mixed the grain and water I dumped them into the bag, covered the bucket and insulated it.


I used an old sweater to insulate the bucket. It did the trick - the mash pretty much held at 150° the whole time.


Mashing is easy. Just sit there and enjoy the starch conversion. Sparging sucks though. The general instructions stated to draw off the wort at a rate of 1 cup per minute while slowly adding hot (175°F) water on the top. Since I used a bucket there is no built-in sparge, so I had to slowly ladel the water on top. When I cracked the drain the grain bag was drawn into the drain valve, all but stopping up the flow. So getting 1 cup/min was a laughable chore. I was "left holding the bag" straight up and away from the bung the entire time so the wort could flow out.


My kingdom for a proper mash tun! The entire sparge lasted about an hour (with recircs and interruptions) so I guess I got it sort of kind of right. The water at the end of it all looked light but not too light (not that I have much experience to compare it to) so I don't think I got too many husky tannins in the wort.


When all was said and done, I collected 2.5 gallons of wort at SG 1.041. The goal was 3 gallons but I was out of patience and out of sparge water. The quick math tells me 102.5 GU, which when diluted to 3 gallons would have been an SG 1.034. Target would have been 3 gal at 1.036/7, so I can assume I came close to the sugar extraction I wanted. So I pumped the wort volume up to 6 gallons, began heating and carried on as normal.

Cooling once again went on in a snow bank - and it took way too long. I haven't detected any DMS in my latest sample, so I guess I'm okay, but I'm sure the stuff will be hazy as heck. I compensated with malt during the boil and water after transfer to get as close to a 1.066 OG as possible. Of course I forgot to measure "final" OG so I'll just assume I'm in the ballpark (within .003). Fermentation got a fast start, and blowoff was noisy and frequent for several days.


Happiness is a blow off tube full of yeast...that box contains the Chocolate Porter in secondary. Ten days later I transferred to secondary.



The weight on my hydrometer is uneven so it doesn't float straight up and down. SG was in the vicinity of 1.016 at transfer, so right now the beer is in the low-mid 6% ABV range. It tasted great, too. A good pale ale taste, with some of the toastiness of the Victory Malt, with serious but not out of control bitterness. An evident citrus/grapefruit character to the bitterness.

I'll be keeping the beer in secondary for around three weeks, the last two of which it will be dry-hopped, and possibly oaked as I found some sweet-looking French oak chips at my local homebrew shop. It's a bit cloudy, so I plan on fining with some gelatin before bottling. I still don't think that will be enough to eliminate haze completely. To remedy this, I have finally purchased a wort chiller and will also pay much more attention to racking the wort off the break post-boil instead of just transferring as much as I can. That method will get tested tomorrow when I brew my next batch.