Black Session IPA

 

  I've tasted a few black IPA's over the years and the ones I've liked the best are those that have absolutely no roasted barley flavor. These are rare, expecially here in Mexico. With a black IPA I want to close my eyes and taste a West coast style IPA with a boat load of hop flavor and aroma, subtle caramel and bread sweetness with a substantial bitter backbone. Then, I want to open my eyes and be shocked at the fact that the beer is jet black. This is my desire and what I attempt to do with the following session IPA recipe. I've complicated my efforts by using roasted malted barley. I could more easily use Sinamar but that product is too expensive and I think I can get the same results with a little extra effort. 

In this recipe I did a cold steep of 650 grams of Carafa III de-bittered barley in 2 liters of reverse osmosis water for 12 hours in the fridge. After this cold steep I ran the liquid through coffee filters trying to initially get as much of the wet grain dust out as possible. I then let this liquid rest for another 12 hours and decanted the liquid off the top of the remainder of the slurry that had settled to the bottom. On brew day, I heated the liquid to a simmer for 10 minutes to pasturize and finally, when I added it to the wort I found there to be some additional dust/slurry in the bottom of the pan which I was careful to leave out of the beer. Just pouring in the clearest of the Carafa liquid as possible.

Through this process I hoped to mimic Sinamar.

Here are the steps and ingredients for what I'm calling "BS IPA".

Black Session India Pale Ale

Mash Eff. 84%

Attn. 83%

ABV 5.25%

SRM 28

IBU 43

OG 1.048

FG 1.008

Pilsner malt 16 lbs.

Crystal #20 8 ozs.

Carapils 1.5 lbs.

650 grams de-bittered carafa III for color only

I use the Bru'n water pale ale profile along with 80% reverse

osmosis water and 20% of the local tap water.

Mash in 5 gals. H2O for 90 minutes

Sparge with 11 gals. H2O

Boil for 75 minutes,

60 mins. Warrior for 38 ibu

10 mins. Chinook for 5 ibu

Add carafa liquid at flame out

Then Cool Pool for 20 minutes at 160f. with 180 grams of cryo

Ekuanot.

Chill to 66f. and transfer to FV.

Aerate with pure O2

Add salvaged US-05 ale yeast and ALDC

Continue fermentation for 5 days and raise temperature to 72f.

for 2 days. Then reduce temperature to 60f. and dry hop for 

24 hours with 100 grams cryo Equanot.

Then, chill to 50f. and rack to kegs for conditioning in refer.

Cheers!

Duvel Clone or Belgian Golden Strong

 One of my favorite styles of beer is the Belgian Golden Strong, and the classic commercial example is Duvel. When operating the brewery in San Miguel, I always tried to have this beer in the rotation, and as delicious as this beer is, the ingredients are as simple as you can get.

Pilsner malt and refined sugar.

You could complicate it if you want to by producing some inverted sugar to replace the refined white sugar, but I haven't found it to improve the beer, and I like to keep things simple if the results are good. The best yeast I've found over the years that comes the closest to mimicking that unique flavor of Duvel is White Labs WLP545 yeast, and I won't brew this beer if I don't have any to pitch.

Now, as simple as I like to keep this recipe, I was forced to use some acidulated malt in my latest batch in order to drop the mash pH to 5.3.

One other caveat: I didn't get the efficiency from my mash that I calculated the recipe based on. I was expecting to be in the low 80%, but ended up with 78% and was forced to add some additional sugar to make my preferred original gravity. Then, rather than do math, I just dumped in 2.2 pounds of sugar when in fact I only needed 1 pound. Soooo... my O.G. came in at 1.079 instead of the 1.074 that I was shooting for. Sooo... the alcohol came in higher. If I'm not mistaken, Duvel is 8.5% ABV, and this beer came in at 9.3% ABV. Not quite as drinkable at that higher percentage, but it will still be a crowd-pleaser for those that like their Belgians boozy.

The following is my recipe as intended, and I've included the discrepancies in parenthesis for your reference.

Recipe:

I brewed an 11 gal. post boil batch anticipating 2 full 5 gallon kegs after fermentation. I referenced Bru'n water yellow bitter water profile and used 100% reverse osmosis water.

Efficiency 84% (actual 78%),  Attenuation 87% (actual 92%),  ABV 8.5% (actual 9.3), SRM 4.5, IBU 35, OG 1.074 (actual 1.079), FG 1.008, PH 5.3

23 lbs. Pilsner malt (Weyermann)

.75 lbs. Acid malt 

4.4 lbs. or 2 kilos (actual 3 kilos) refined sugar at start of boil

Mash in at 152f. in 6 gal. h2o for 60 minutes.

Sparge with 10 gal. for 45 minutes with 170f. h2o 

Boil 90 minutes with:

60 min. add: 65 gram Warrior 13% a/a est. 34 ibu's

20 min. add: 20 gram Tettnang 2.1 a/a% for est. 1 ibu's

Chilled down to 68f., transfer to fermenter and pitched 3 pkgs WLP545 yeast. 

After 3 days raised temperature to 72f.

After 3 more days raised temp. to 75f.

After 3 more days lowered temp. to 62f. for 1 day.

Transfer to kegs and lagered in kegerator for 2 weeks at 40f.

Lessons learned - Add sugar to achieve gravity a little at a time if needed, checking gravity as I make the additions.

Cheers!

Bottle In A Bag

Improvising with Style: A Homebrew Hack Worth Keeping

 I ran into a bit of a special needs situation last week, and figured it was worth sharing—not for sympathy, but because this is what I love about homebrewing. No matter how many batches you’ve clocked, something will always go sideways. A missing part, a busted seal, or in this case a completely disgusting bottling bucket. The unexpected shows up, uninvited, and dares you to stay creative.

So here's the scene, I'm in my element puttering around the brew cave and I'm needing to bottle a batch of porter. Easy enough—except the only bottling buckets I had looked like they’d been dragged through a gravel lot and left to soak in dirty dishwater for a few years. Discolored, scratched to hell, and definitely not the sterile environment you’d want for your pristine, freshly fermented beer. Unless, of course, you're into doctoring your brew with unknown bacteria strains and suggesting that it's a Belgian such or such.

What to do?

Now, for many of you who've wasted time following this blog know, I normally ferment in garbage cans lined with food-grade plastic bags—sterile, easy to salvage yeast, cheap. Turns out, those same bags are the perfect workaround when your bottling bucket is more biohazard than brewery tool.

Here’s the move: line the nasty bucket with a clean, sanitized bag. That way, your beer never touches the inside of the bucket, and you keep the precious liquid safely quarantined away from those bacteria harboring crevices. But what about the spigot connected to your nasty bucket you may ask? Well, you're still going to use it but you will simply re-install it with the bag in place.

First, prepare yourself. Wash your hands. Like, really wash them and I like to dip them in a solution of acid to be safe to make sure I'm not introducing anything into the bag when I'm installing the spigot. 

Drop the bag liner into the bucket, I had to trim off some excess, a couple feet at the top. It was comically tall as my fermenting garbage cans are about 15 gallon compared to this 6 gallon bottling bucket. With bag in place I insert the spigot as normal through the usual hole in the bucket, pushing it through and up against the bag. Then, from the inside of the bag at the point where the threaded part of the spigot pushed up against the bag I pressed on the washer and then threaded on the nut over the bag. This locks the spigot in place and seals the bag tight around it.

Now, with everything snug, I pierced a little hole in the bag at the mouth of the spigot to let the beer flow through. Bottle as usual. Beautiful. The beer stayed protected in its sanitary cocoon while I bottled like usual. When I finished, I dumped the dregs, pulled the spigot, and lifted out the bag—no scrubbing, no sanitizing, no bucket shame. The bucket underneath? Still filthy. Still disgusting but it never touched a drop of beer.

I liked the results so much I’d use this trick even if the bucket was brand new. It’s too easy not to. And in homebrewing, anything that saves you time, cuts out cleanup, and still treats the beer right? That’s my kind of solution.

Cheers.