Cider, Cyser, and Graff (11/11/12)

Every year, Bob's Homebrew gets a sweet shipment of apple juice from an orchard that produces cider apples up north. Cider apples differ from eating apples in that they are cultivated for their unique flavors, not their sugar content. Juice made from supermarket apples ferments away to nothingness, but this juice is packed with residual flavors that ought to survive that fermentation. That said, it also tastes pretty delicious unfermented, not unlike a good apple juice.

Last year's cider batch split between cider yeast and hefeweizen yeast turned out pretty well, but I've always found cider to be a little bit boring. This year I decided to split up my three gallons into three different beverages. Prompted by Lee, one is a cyser (cider + mead), another will be dry hopped, and the third is a beer/cider hybrid called graff.

The cyser is made with a gallon of juice combined with 22oz of Wessel's Local Raw Honey. It's really about the easiest thing you could possibly do, and only requires mixing honey into apple juice. The mixing process proved harder than anticipated, but fortunately Andrew "The Fish" Haddock was on hand to help me out. The juice came pre-sulfited, so no heating was necessary. You typically need to add yeast nutrient to mead, but considering that cider likes to be fermented slowly, and already contains a health amount of yeast nutrient, I neglected to add any. I've never made cyser before (or even tasted it, for that matter), but considering that mead takes between three months and a year to mature, and cider needs about the same, I'm expecting this one to be a summer drinker.

The only thing easier than cyser is straight cider. It required nothing but yeast and an airlock, and that's all it got. Lee had mentioned not aerating it, which I assume is to prevent excessive yeast growth, but Bob let me know it had been heavily aerated between the pressing, the transport, and the dispensing, so that boat's sailed. Dry-hopped cider needs to be dry-hopped, but the dry-hopping will come later, and though I haven't decided on what hops to use, I'm leaning towards Citra or Amarillo, or hell, maybe even Palisade. We'll see how it all ferments. The OG was a high 1.063, and I pitched in half a packet of Wyeast Cider yeast into both the cyser and the cider.

The graff, which against my better judgement I have started calling Zach Graff, is 1.5 gallons of beer to 1 gallon of apple juice. The beer is a fairly simple reduction of our typical Belgian recipes: no specialty grains, lightly hopped with Saaz, and fermented with Wyeast 1388. The recipe is as follows:

Batch size: 1.5 gallons

Boil Volume: 2.5 gallons

Calculated OG: 1.066

Estimated FG:??

Estimated ABV:??

Calculated IBUs (Tinseth):27

Pitching Temperature: 65

Yeast: Wyeast 1388

Fermentation vessel: Bucket

Other Fermentables		Amount	%	Max Pts.
DME		2.5	38%	42.00

 

Hops/Additions		Amount	Time	AA%
Saaz		1	60	3.0%

The gallon of juice was pitched after the wort was chilled, bringing the final concoction to 2.5 gallons. I really have no idea how well the juice will ferment, so I'm at a loss right now for estimated final gravity and ABV. My best guess leaves it around 7%. I thought about adding grains of paradise, but forgot. Ah, maybe next time!

Thanks to Solly for getting up early to help me get supplies, and Andrew for helping with the brew.

Olde Tubby (10/14/12)

I've been playing ultimate saturday mornings lately, and found Bob's Homebrew on the way home several times now. I've been going on Bob's advice for recipes, and so I've brewed this stout with an English ESB yeast. Prized for its flocculation, the 1968 is designed to keep your English beers malty. I'l add that three of my four last stouts were underattentuated.

I made the starter yesterday afternoon. Its pretty flocculant. I think I'm gonna need this beer on a shaker plate. Having already mastered the stout (See: Surly Sunday 11-06-12, and Mocha 4-15-12), I took the previous recipe and shrunk the base malt bill. I didn't budge on the specialty grains. Things are different now that Lee's no longer here, and I don't have a problem with a 1/6 of my grain bill dedicated to roasted barley. I also upped the IBUs from 44 to 65 to balance the maltiness.

Calculated O.G: 1.075
Measured F.G: 1.031
Expected Attenuation: 59%
Calculated ABV: 5.8%
Calculated IBUs (Tinseth): 65
Pitching Temperature: 68 F
Starter: 2.6 L
Fermentation Vessel: Bucket

Malts Mashed		Amount	%	Max Pts.
Chocolate		1.5	7%	28.00
Roast Barley		2.2	10%	25.00
Crystal 120		1.25	6%	33.00

Other Fermentables		Amount	%	Max Pts.
DME		6.5	30%	42.00

Hops/Additions		Amount	Time	AA%
Horizon		2	60	11.9%

Large, in frequent bubbles began four hours after pitching. Temperature rose to 76F, and I placed the fermenter in a bucket of water. 12 hours later the bucket was warm too, and I removed the beer, now at 74F. Bubbling mostly stopped by Tuesday, 10/16.

Update 10/19/12 - Gravity at 1.031, and it tastes pretty great.

Update 10/29/12 - Bottled. Gravity still at 1.031. Even with the large starter, attenuation is down at 59%. When they said this yeast don't eat much, they weren't kidding. Attenuation aside, its actually pretty delicious. Its a bit sweet, but that sweetness is well balanced by the dark malts and hops. Presuming the carbonation comes out right, it could have really excellent mouthfeel. Should be about 2.4 volumes of CO2 in it. I was aiming for 2.3, but there was a little less beer than I expected.

Citra Grapefruit IPA (9/12/12)

I'm hesitant to say this beer was inspired by Lagunitas's DayTime IPA. In fact, I went out and bought the beer with the express intention of making something in the same style, a low ABV daytime brew. The beer itself, however, didn't hold up. Its lack of body and hollow malt character left it tasting more like hoppy water than beer, so when I made up the recipe for this beer I wanted to be confident it was different. At 6.5 ABV and a starting gravity of 1.064, the beer would definitely have some body. Not an imperial stout, but something. Alas, the gods frowned. When I checked my dry malt extract today I found a sad bag with less than half the DME I needed. The 5 gallon batch became a 2.5 gallon batch, and 1.064 became 1.045. I'm hoping the attenuation stays low, but for now it looks like I'm gonna have mid-day gulper.

On the bright side, its gonna be packed with Citra and grapefruit, a combination I have a lot of hope for.

Calculated O.G: 1.045
Measured F.G: 1.012
Expected Attenuation: 73%
Estimated ABV: 4.3%
Calculated IBUs (Tinseth): 86
Pitching Temperature: 70 F
Starter: 3 liter (for a batch that was never brewed)
Fermentation Vessel: Bucket

Other Fermentables		Amount	%	Max Pts.
DME		2.65	100%	42.00

Hops/Additions		Amount	Time	AA%
Citra		0.3	60	15.3%
Citra		0.5	20	15.3%
Citra		0.5	10	15.3%
Citra		2	0	15.3%

The batch is fermenting in the same bucket as Peche Mortal did, in which it left a distinctly peach odor. I cleaned it as well as I could, but it remains to be seen whether the peach will have any effect. I plan to dry hopping with 2.7oz of Citra, and the rind of two grapefruits, and maybe a lemon. And I forgot the camden tablets again.

9/14/12 - Added 1.7 oz Citra, 1 grapefruit rind, and two lime rinds. I opted to lower the Citra so as not to overwhelm the other citrus. I went with lime on a whim, and I think it will round out the hops really well.

9/30/12 - Bottled. 2.5oz of priming sugar in about 2gal means the carbonation could be up to ~3.1 volumes. Tastes excellent, completely citrus.

La Mure (The Blackberry) 9/2/2012

August means blackberries here in Seattle, and of all the good ways to use a freezer full of free blackberries, I decided to toss them in a beer. Big surpise, huh? So La Mure was born. Its a Belgian Golden Strong Ale with a healthy helping of blackberries. This is the second time I've used De Dolle's house yeast, and the first time it came out a little sweet and a bit underattenuated. I'm hoping that sweetness helps to balance out the potent tartness of the blackberries.

Of note: I forgot to add camden tablets to neutralize the chlorine. It should fall out of solution naturally, but we'll see how this turns out.

Calculated O.G: 1.065
Expected F.G: 1.012
Expected Attenuation: 82%
Estimated ABV: 7.0%
Calculated IBUs (Tinseth): 26
Pitching Temperature: 70 F
Starter: None
Fermentation Vessel: Bucket

Other Fermentables		Amount	%	Max Pts.
DME		2.8	74%	42.00
Cane Sugar		1	26%	46.00

Hops/Additions		Amount	Time	AA%
Saaz		1.25	60	3.0%

Fermentation started slow and steady, bubbling began at 8 hours.

9/5/12 - Fermentation slowed significantly, added 1lb of cane sugar. Bubbling restarted that evening.

9/8/12 - Added 3.5lbs of blackberries.

9/14/12 - Gravity at 1.010

 

Golden Bear #3: The Golden Bear Rises (7/26/12)

This marks round three of our most beloved beer, the Golden Bear. This time around I decided to go with all Styrian Goldings, Duvel-style, and also added 1 gram of Grains of Paradise at flame out. Other than that its pretty much just like the first two.

Batch size: 5 gallons

Boil volume: 6 gallons

Calculated OG: 1.073

Measured FG: 1.011
Attenutation: 85%

Estimated ABV: 8.13

Calculated IBUs (Tinseth): 32

Pitching Temperature: 70

Yeast: Wyeast 1388 Belgian Golden Strong

Starter: 2 Liter

Fermentation vessel: Bucket

Other Fermentables		Amount	%	Max Pts.
DME		6.5	35%	42.00
Cane Sugar		2	11%	46.00

 

Hops/Additions		Amount	Time	AA%
Styrian Goldings		3	60	3.2%

Fermented hard and steady for 36 hours, then started to fall off.

8/2/12 - 2lbs of sugar added, bubbling quickly

8/11/12 - Bubbling has nearly stopped. Gravity of 1.011. Bottled.

9/6/12 - The aroma of the beer is very sulfurous. That could mean the yeast produced extra dimethal sulfide (DMS), which should fade with time, or there was a bacterial infection. The result remains to be seen.

10/2/12 - The sulfur flavor has left the beer, must have been DMS. Flavor is sublime. More tasting notes to come.

Peche Mortel 7/15/12

Randy Mosher says peach beers are better with apricots, thus Peche Mortel was born. A Belgian golden strong ale with apricots, this is our first experiment with fresh fruit. The recipe was adapted from our highly successful Golden Bear, with some of the sugar replaced with fresh apricots.

5.5 lbs of apricots were added 7/22, a week after brewing, when bubbling through the airlock had slowed significantly. Before tossing them into primary, I soaked them in diluted starsan, a meager effort to combat infection. They were then split in two and slowly dropped into the fermenter, core and all.

7/28/12 - Gravity is down to 1.013, and the apricots appear to have mold on them, though it could just be yeast scum. If its mold, it will grow, otherwise it should be fine.

8/2/12 - No change to the apricots, now appears they just yeasty when dropped into primary.

9/2/12 - Gravity of 1.010. The peaches still look funky, but the beer is clear and delectable. The flavor is very peachy, with lots of tartness and just a bit of sweetness. Almost no hop flavor to detect. Will bottle tomorrow.

9/3/12 - Bottled with 2.6 volumes of CO2 entirely in thicker belgian and german bottles.

Batch Size: 2.5 gal
Boil Volume: 3.5 gal
Estimated OG: 1.073
Estimated FG: 1.010
Estimated ABV: 8.13
Calculated IBUs (Tinseth): 22
Pitching Temperature: 68F
Yeast: Wyeast 1388 Belgian Golden Strong
Starter: None

Other Fermentables		Amount	%	Max Pts.
DME		3	34%	42.00
Cane Sugar		1	11%	46.00

Hops/Additions		Amount	Time	AA%
Styrian Goldings		1	60	3.2%

The Hit List

As Angry Monocle's joint brewing operations come to a close, we take a moment to reflect on what we've learned over the last 36 documented batches of beer (as well as three batches of cider, and a handful of undocumented batches). Most were very good, but a couple were terrible, a few were mediocre, and four were among the greatest things I've ever tasted.

Hit list (Lee):

• Surly Sunday (Imperial Coffee Stout)
• The Bloom (Double IPA)
• The Cosmos (Belgian-style Quadruple with roasted barley)
• Golden Bear (Belgian-style Golden Strong Ale)

Learning experiences (Lee):

• Belgian Pale (failed experiment, tasted like rubber bands)
• Mon Oncle (possibly infected, over-carbonated, tasted like bark)
• The Mad Hopper (cloyingly sweet)
• Dunkelweizen (soy sauce, barely drinkable for me, though some liked it)

What went right:

1. Yeast. The most noteworthy yeasts we've used are Belgian strains from Wyeast and White Labs. Sourced from the great breweries of Belgium, these yeast strains produce high concentrations of esters and phenolic compounds, lending beer fruit- and spice-like flavors. One of our most universally enjoyed beers (the Golden Bear) was made from the simplest recipe possible, but the yeast we used (WLP 570, from Duvel Moortgat) gave it an incredibly complex aroma and flavor. Belgian yeasts are best with a couple pounds of sugar to make the beer drier and more drinkable. 

2. Roasted Barley (lots). Our stouts regularly exceed 15% roasted barley. There are other worthwhile roasted grains, but unmalted barley roasted black is one to treasure, and a key part of all our stouts. Two of them stand out from the rest in quality: The Cosmos, a 12% ABV Belgian-style stout, and Surly Sunday, our first coffee stout.

3. American hops (lots). Now that summer has finally come to Seattle, I want to drink IPAs all the time. Though the British invented the style, Americans have taken it to another level, using new American hop varieties and increasing the amount of hops per gallon of beer. To get a sense of how the way we use hops compares to the way big breweries use hops, consider that Budweiser and MillerCoors use about two ounces of hops per beer barrel (31 gallons). Our last IPA had 11 ounces of hops in five gallons—over 32 times the rate of the big breweries. Hops we like for IPAs include: Ahtanum, Amarillo, Cascade, Citra, Centennial, Chinook, Horizon, and Nugget.

Europeans sometimes deride American hops for producing "catty" (i.e., cat piss) aromas in beer. I have tasted this in American IPAs, and believe that it is almost exclusively associated with old or mistreated IPAs, and therefore a result of oxidation (i.e., staling). Depending on how the beer is treated and how sensitive your palate is to the flavors of oxidation, you may start to taste off flavors at 2 months after bottling—or at two weeks after bottling. The difference between a week-old IPA and a year-old IPA is profound; they are barely recognizable as the same beer. Accordingly, good IPA yeasts ferment quickly and need little conditioning time to clean up off-flavors created during fermentation. The Chico strain from Sierra Nevada (Wyeast 1056) and its descendants are industry standards, but dry British ale yeasts are also worth exploring.

Conventional wisdom says that IPAs with a lot of bitterness should be balanced by sweetness, i.e., more unfermented sugars in the wort. My experience with IPAs has been the opposite. I find that since sweeter beers are also more full-bodied, they tend to coat the palate and contribute to a more lingering bitter/bittersweet finish—whereas dry IPAs tend to finish pretty clean even at extreme levels of IBUs. See: Russian River, Pliny the Elder.

What went awry:

1. Under-attenuation. Attenuation refers to the percentage of sugars that are converted into alcohol by the yeast. A highly attenuated beer is therefore a dry beer, while an under-attenuated beer is sweet. I find that, with the possible exception of stout, beer that is under 75% apparent attenuation suffers in drinkability. This is especially true of Belgian ales. Under-attenuated Belgians tend to be cloyingly sweet. We use very little or no crystal malt in our Belgians nowadays, and always add some sugar to further improve attenuation. Adequate aeration and pitching the proper amount of yeast is also crucial.

2. Yeast. Belgian yeasts are not suited for all beers. After brewing two Belgian IPAs (The Mad Hopper and Chomp Chomp) and several Belgian ales with roasted grains (Le Jardin, The Cosmos, The Belgian Black) I am inclined to think that these yeast strains do not complement beers with chocolate malt or high levels of hop bitterness. All of this holds even more true for Hefeweizen yeasts, which we have stopped using altogether. The strong banana notes they produce are hard to pair with other flavors, and Hefe yeasts have not attenuated very well for us.

3. Chocolate. We've used chocolate in two beers: The Aphrodisiac and The Mocha. In the Aphrodisiac we used cacao nibs from Theo Chocolates, which contribute complex, raw chocolate flavors, but lack the straight-up chocolate flavor that most people are familiar with. In the Mocha we used 100% Dutch-processed cocoa powder with five minutes left in the boil. It gave the beer some chocolate flavor, along with some additional bitterness, but had trouble distinguishing itself through the coffee and the under-attenuation of the beer. I think my main mistake was trying to use chocolate as a secondary flavor. I probably won't use chocolate again soon, but if I did I would make a straight-up chocolate stout, with a full pound of chocolate (maybe a little vanilla, too). I would add 8 oz of cocoa powder (5 gallon batch size) at flameout and 8 oz of cacao nibs (soaked in vodka for 24 hours) to secondary. I would also use 5% roasted barley, 5% pale chocolate malt, 5% Crystal 80, and 5% de-bittered black malt. I'd also lower the IBUs to 25 to compensate for the bitterness added by the chocolate.

4. Infection. Note: the yeast and bacteria that infect beer are non-pathenogenic—i.e., harmless. As much fun as exploding bottles are, infection really cuts into the shelf life of your beer. I suspect our main problems stemmed from wild yeast contamination from inadequately cleaned bottles. We always Oxiclean our bottles when we first get them, both to remove the labels and clean out the insides. Soaking and rinsing 100 bottles is a pretty huge pain, though, so after the initial Oxicleaning we just rinse and sanitize our bottles between batches. This works well enough if you're good about rinsing the bottles immediately after drinking the beer. We lapsed in this respect for awhile, and as a result found evidence of contamination in The Cosmos and The Aphrodisiac. We've since borrowed a high-pressure bottle rinser that we use if a bottle isn't rinsed immediately after use.


Reflections on coffee stouts:

Even though Surly Sunday, when fresh, was the best coffee stout and one of the best beers I've ever had, I think there is still a lot to learn about brewing this style of beer. Coffee stouts are challenging due mainly to the following fact: coffee tastes best immediately after brewing, while imperial stouts generally peak between six months and two years after brewing. To help compensate for this, we let the beer mature in secondary for extra time and add the coffee at bottling. One strategy I might pursue in the future is to brew plain imperial stouts and keep fresh extra-strength iced coffee on hand to add when serving. We've been using cold-brewed coffee for our stouts, because it seems to last better. I've recently been impressed by hot-brewed iced coffee (chilled immediately by the addition of ice), which I'd like to experiment with in beer. I've also heard reports that steeping whole-bean or coarsely ground (percolator grind) in the beer for 12–24 hours produces a more stable coffee flavor.

One other practical difficulty with brewing coffee stouts is filtration. Paper or cloth filters do the best job of removing sediment from coffee, but using a drip method of filtration also tends to introduce a lot of oxygen into the coffee, which is bad news for flavor stability. One could boil the brewed coffee to remove dissolved oxygen, but this would also destroy the coffee's flavor. A press pot could minimize oxidation, and the sediment should settle to the bottom of the bottle with the yeast, but presses require a coarse grind. More cold brew experiments necessary to determine optimal grind.

I would also like to experiment more with coffee selection. We've been using Peet's Arabian Mocha-Java, because it has a very recognizable classic flavor and its roasty, chocolatey flavors complement roasted barley very well. One idea I've been toying with for awhile is using a more delicate, lighter-roasted coffee (Ethiopian springs to mind) in a subtler beer, like a dark Belgian ale or English brown ale, and staying away from grains darker than pale chocolate. I also want to make a dry-hopped coffee stout with Indonesian coffee.

Duende (6/5/12)

Batch Size: 5
Boil Volume: 6 gal
Calculated OG: 1.091
Estimated FG: 1.004
Estimated ABV: 11.4
Calculated IBUs (Tinseth): 29
Pitching Temperature: 68F
Yeast: Wyeast French Saison
Starter: 2.5 gal (yeast cake from Le Jardin)

Malts Mashed		Amount	%	Max Pts.
Special B		1	7%	30.00
Crystal 80		0.5	3%	34.00
Crystal 60		0.5	3%	34.00

Other Fermentables		Amount	%	Max Pts.
Cane Sugar		2	13%	46.00
Candi Sugar (dark)		2	13%	36.00

Other Fermentables		Amount	%	Max Pts.
DME		6	60%	42.00

Bottled 7/4/12 to 2.7 volumes of CO2.

Major Major (6/23/12)

Nugget Nectar, a seasonal release from Troëgs Brewing Company in Pennsylvania, is one of the finer beers ever brewed. Though marketed as an Imperial Amber, the beer is more often compared to double IPAs than other amber ales due to the massive quantity of hops it contains. Two things distinguish it from a typical double IPA: the use of Vienna and Munich malts, which produce the beer's amber color and toasty malt flavor; and the use of Nugget and Warrior—usually used for bittering—as dry hops, which provides a unique hop aroma. This brew is our first real attempt to recreate a commercial beer.

The reason we haven't used Vienna or Munich in previous batches is that, as base malts, they must be mashed to convert their starches to fermentable sugars. We've never mashed before, but for this beer we made the effort. We mashed in a bag in the kettle for 60 minutes, using two gallons of water with five pounds of malt and aiming for a mash temperature of 150˚F. It proved more difficult than I anticipated to use the stove to adjust the temperature, so after a few minutes I just turned the stove to low heat and put a towel on the lid. This seemed to work fairly well; the mash ended at 147˚F. We sparged by pouring water (150-160˚F) through the grain bag as it sat in a colander over the kettle.

We ended up with a bit more volume in the kettle than we planned, so we performed a 90 minute boil to boil off some of the water. This increased the calculated IBUs of the beer somewhat, though we would likely have maxed out solubility of iso-alpha acids in our wort anyway. After we cooled the beer and pitched the yeast, John and Andy helped to provide more aeration (i.e., shaking of the beer bucket) than I usually have patience to perform, which should help to ensure the beer ferments to completion.

Batch Size: 5 gal
Boil Volume: 6.5 gal
Mash Size: 2 gal
Mash Thickness: 1.6 quarts/pound
Strike Temperature: 163˚F
End of Mash: 147˚F
Measured OG: 1.079
Measured FG: 1.017 (?)
Estimated ABV: 8.0
Calculated IBUs (Tinseth): 137
Pitching Temperature: 68F
Yeast: Wyeast 1056 American Ale Yeast
Starter: 3 liters

Malts Mashed		Amount	%	Max Pts.
Munich		2.25	16%	36.00
Vienna		2.25	16%	35.00
Crystal 80		0.3	2%	34.00

Other Fermentables		Amount	%	Max Pts.
DME		5.8	55%	42.00

Hops/Additions		Amount	Time	AA%
Nugget		2	90	12.0%
Chinook		1	30	11.0%
Magnum		1	20	16.0%
Cascade		1	10	7.8%
Nugget		2	0	12.0%

6/30/12: Dry hopped with 2 oz Nugget and 2 oz Warrior (12 days)
7/12/12: Bottled to 2.7 volumes of CO2.


Notes: Hop bag weight insufficient to fully submerge all four ounces of whole cone hops. Dry hop aroma is less intense than expected. Possibly the most bitter beer we've ever made.

Constantinopoly (6/23/12)

We began experimenting with non-standard IPAs last summer, when we brewed two Belgian IPAs (The Mad Hopper and Chomp Chomp). The beers were good, especially the second, but neither really lived up to our high expectations. These experiences, as well as tasting a number of commercial Belgian IPAs, led me to the belief that Belgian yeast strains and American hops are not as good together as they are separate, so we moved on to experimenting with other ingredients. We brewed an IPA (Christopher) with a quarter gram of grains of paradise, a pepper-like African spice. The beer didn't turn out quite as well as the IPA that preceded it (The Bloom—among our finest accomplishments), but I think that had more to do with the hops we used than the spice.

For this batch, we're adding the zest of one grapefruit to the beer when we dry hop it. Many great American hops have a strong grapefruit character, right back to the first American hop to draw international attention: Cascade. The most strongly grapefruit-tasting beer I've had is Firestone Walker's Double Jack, which uses Warrior, Columbus, Cascade, Centennial, Amarillo and Simcoe. While our beer is not a clone—Double Jack doesn't contain actual grapefruit and has a slightly different hop schedule—I would not at all mind if it turned out tasting like Double Jack. We're combining some classic American hops, namely Cascade, Centennial, and Chinook, with some newer proprietary varietals, namely Amarillo and Citra. All are highly aromatic hops with sweet citrus fruit flavors, with Chinook also bringing a hint of pine and spice to the mix.

Unlike our previous few IPAs, this beer does contain crystal malt, namely half a pound of Crystal 80. I have come to favor the middle range of crystal malts (40˚ to 100˚ lovibond) because they are dark enough to contribute flavor even in small amounts—large quantities of crystal malt are generally to be avoided because they lead to overly sweet beer—but light enough that they don't contain the overbearing (to my palate) burnt caramel and raisin flavors of Crystal 120 and Special B.

This beer contains five hop varietals, continuing a trend of ours of brewing with greater numbers of hop varietals. Our last IPA used four varieties of hops, as did the one before that. The previous IPA, the first we brewed in Seattle, used three varieties of hops. The outlier in this set is the very first IPA we ever made. The Magic Carpet contained around 20 varieties of hops from all over the world, because instead of hope cones or pellets, we used hop dust—the sediment that forms at the bottoms of boxes of hop pellets. It was on sale at the homebrew store, and produced a beer that we were proud of at the time. I think at this point I would put an upper limit on the number of varietals one ought to use in a beer at seven or eight.

Batch Size: 5
Boil Volume: 6 gal
Calculated OG: 1.075
Measured FG: 1.013 (?)
Estimated ABV: 7.9
Calculated IBUs (Tinseth): 106
Pitching Temperature: 68F
Yeast: Wyeast 1098 British Ale Yeast
Starter: 3 liters
Fermentation vessel: Bucket

Crystal 80

0.5

6%

34.00

Other Fermentables		Amount	%	Max Pts.
DME		7	78%	42.00
Cane Sugar		1.5	17%	46.00

Hops/Additions		Amount	Time	AA%
Chinook		1	60	12.0%
Horizon		1	60	16.0%
Cascade		1	15	6.8%
Centennial		1	10	7.8%
Cascade		1	0	6.8%
Centennial		1	0	7.8%

6/25/12: Added sugar (third day)
6/30/12:Dry hopped with 2 oz Amarillo, 2 oz Citra (10-12 days)
7/2/12: Added zest of one red grapefruit
7/10/12: Bottled to 2.7 volumes of CO2