Though I've mostly calmed down my noob homebrewer tendency to take the kitchen sink approach to recipe design, I still get too weird too fast with my hopping regime to really understand what
Unfortunately, this beer lived up to my expectations...of failure. Despite using more than a half pound of hops, it really lacks in flavor, aroma, and even bitterness. The malt end misses the mark: it's sort of sickly sweet (though it's fairly well attenuated) and insipid, lacking any real grain character. The appearance is also quite strange: it's quite a bit darker than I'd expect from the grains used and has a weird pink hue that's pretty intense in the bottle dregs. While it's drinkable, it's a solid flop. The rest of the batch will find its way down the drain shortly.
My thoughts are that I have a number of recipe and process issues here, including (but probably not limited to):
- Serious oxidation problems, especially at bottling. I try to be conscientious about keeping out oxygen at transfer, but I suspect I'm still not doing a good enough job.
- Messing with water chemistry without having a firm grasp on what's in my tap water to start or really what I'm trying to accomplish. I haven't invested in an actual water report, relying on an old report someone posted to brewersfriend.com. To that I've been adding what seems like an awful lot of minerals in a somewhat haphazard fashion to make the numbers look right on brewersfriend's water calculator come out right. I've tried to make my way through Water and have failed spectacularly; I need to get a better handle on what I'm trying to achieve before playing around with this any more.
- Bittering addition is too small. I still remember my very first extract kit: a pale ale. When I tried it, I was dismayed by its overly strong bitterness. This memory has stuck with me and has informed all of my batches up to now, to the point where I get really gun shy around the early hop addition for pretty much every recipe. Until I really push into NEIPA territory, I think my beers--particularly the pale ales and IPAs--could really do with a more substantial bittering charge.
- Adding flavor/aroma hops in too many ways to understand what each of them do. Hopbursting, whirlpool additions, staggered dry hop additions, mid-ferment dry hops to encourage biotrasformation by the yeast...I've given every method I've come across a shot, though usually not one at a time so I could figure out what each contribution lent the final beer. It's time to simplify and learn for myself what each of these will do.
- Rushing the batch to finish. Yes, a batch of beer can be done in a week, depending on certain factors. In my hurry to have this batch ready for the wedding, I threw caution to the wind a bit and pushed ahead with certain steps, particularly bottling, perhaps before they should've happened. Gotta plan better and learn to chill.
In the spirit of this blog--and proper documentation in general--here's the recipe. Maybe I'll revisit its battered, broken husk at some point once I figure out what the hell I'm doing when it comes to hoppy beers. Also as of this post, I'm going to start including my batch number. One function of this blog is to act as an online batch log, so I should keep the batch numbers, right?
#161 Matrimonial IPA
Batch size: 5 gallons
Projected OG: 1.068
Projected SRM: 4.5
Projected IBU: 36.0
Boil time: 90 minutes
Brewhouse efficiency: 66.5%
Grains
66.7% - 12 lb 2-row
22.2% - 4 lb Weyermann Pils
11.1% - 2 lb White Wheat
Hops
.4 oz Millennium (15.6%) (80 min)
1 oz Simcoe (12.9%) (5 min)
1 oz Waimea (17.8%) (5 min)
.5 oz Mosaic (11.0%) (5 min)
2 oz Waimea (hop steep - 30 min below 185F)
1 oz Mosaic (hop steep - 30 min below 185F)
1 oz Cascade (8.4%) (hop steep - 30 min below 185F)
1 oz Cascade (dry hop - day 4)
1 oz Waimea (dry hop - day 4)
1 oz Simcoe (dry hop - day 10)
.5 oz Mosaic (dry hop - day 10)
Yeast
WLP001 California Ale - 1.5 L starter
Extras
1 tsp Yeast nutrient (5 min)
.5 Whirlfloc tablet (5 min)
Water (mash)
Profile: Reno
10g Gypsum, 3g Table salt, 11 ml Lactic acid (88%)
2 g Citric acid (sparge)
Brewday: 16 April 2017
Mash: 23 qts @ 152F for 60 minutes
Sparge: 19 qts @ 190F
Pre-boil volume: 7.75 gallons
Pre-boil SG: 15.0P (1.060)
Target water profile: Light colored and hoppy (brewersfriend.com)
Ca 69.0, Mg 3.0, Na 40.4, Cl 52.9, SO4 146.8
Alkalinity -90.0, RA -140.9, pH 5.48
Fermented in swamp cooler at 64F ambient.
Dry hop #1: 21 April 2017
Removed blowoff tube & allowed swamp cooler temp to rise to 66F.
24 April 2017: Taken out of swamp cooler, free rise to 70F over 2 days. Agitated daily.
Dry hop #2: 27 April 2017
Bottled: 29 April 2017
FG: 1.013
ABV: 7.3%
Bottled with 5.1 oz table sugar.
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