AG#30 Triple Hopped Black IPA

[kev]

For my 30th batch I've decided on something a wee bit special. After being told about the recipes on Hopville, I was like a kid in a sweet shop picking out my recipe. I've decided to go with something totally different to my previous recipes. Massive hop bill and a few grains I'm unfamiliar with......and liquid yeast.

I've had "issues" with Wyeast in the past so have stuck to the usual 05 and 04 strains. I fancied a change and also as my brewing skill/patience is increasing I thought I'd do better this time. Lastly, I went for White Labs as it was mentioned on the recipe and I've never used it before. Going to pitch the vial straight into the brew and harvest the yeast after primary for another brew. I'm not going to bother with a starter today as I brew to US batch sizes for my cornies and White Labs say 1 vial is enough for 20 litres - which is how much I make. The only issue I might have is that this beer is both dark and hoppy, which I believe will alter the yeast I harvest, however if I use it to brew another batch of this beer, then it should be cool. Thoughts?

Here we go, recipe is :

5.11kg Pale malt (crisp)
0.46kg Munich
0.15kg Carafa 3
0.15kg Chocloate

90min mash @ 66.7c

90 min boil

27g Chinook @ 60min
9g Chinook @ 30 min
9g nugget @ 30 min
18g Centennial @ 10 min
18g Magnum @ 10 min
36g Simcoe @ 5 min
18g Apollo @ 5 min
18g Magnum @ 5 min
28g Apollo dry hop for 7 days
28g Simcoe dry hop for 7 days

Estimated OG 1060
Estimated FG 1012
Estimated ABV 6.2%
Estimated IBU 90
Estimated colour 52

White Labs California yeast (WLP001)

The only tweaks I made was to replace the centennial with an apollo/columbus mix as The Malt Miller is out of centennial.

I also fitted a new exhaust to my motorbike last night and am desperate to go for a quick blast and scare the county so I left my boil (naughty boy) during the 90-60 min phase and guess what? Boil over - lost about a litre. Lesson learnt.

Also, I didnt take many pics during boil as the hop schedule was quite manic and there's loads of fruit flies/wasps about.

Lets not hang about! The pictures!

Enormous grain bill

Today's a good day

Mash

Wee bit over temp

Sparge

Runnings

The f**king motherload!

Wee treat for me!

Colour and gravity pic

Junk

Wee bit short of 20l

Ended a bit short of 20l unfortunately. Partly due to the boil over and massive hop schedule. Both easily fixed and stupid mistakes.

Gravity was massively over at 1074 as well so I could have liquored back but I didn't have any boiled water, etc ready and thought I'd just go with what I had.

 

[Good Ed]

Mouthwatering recipe, great hop schedule :thumb: good brewing :thumb: my understanding is that US05 is the same strain as WLP001.

 

[kev]

Mouthwatering recipe, great hop schedule :thumb: good brewing :thumb: my understanding is that US05 is the same strain as WLP001.

Cheers - will do a "grain to glass" report on this one so keep an eye out.

Yeh I really like US05 so hopefully this will be good too. Fancied liq yeast for a change really. Going to move this to 2ndary and dry hop after 4 days so that'll give me a massive yeast cake to harvest.

K

 

[kev]

My Beersmith recipe said let this ferment and transfer to 2ndary after 4 days. I thought this was too early and assumed this was to incorporate the dry hops.

Tonight I transferred this to 2ndary and added the HUGE amount of dry hops. The problem is that it was visibly fermenting (inch of foam on top,etc) when I transferred.

Is this right?

I assume there's enough yeast in suspension to keep things going?

K

 

[Good Ed]

You'll be fine, although it's quite un-necessary to transfer to secondary, it's something most American brewers do.

 

[Dunfie]

That does look like a bit of a monster Kev - in a good way. :thumb:

I personally wouldn't have transferred at this stage. You will have plenty of yeast in suspension but I just don't like tampering with the brew for a few days. However there are no definitive rights and wrongs when it comes to dropping beer into a secondary it's just about personal preference and learning from experiments.

 

[kev]

Aye fair points.

If I'm honest, when I opened it up I didn't want to touch it as it was going great, but I had to get 56g of dry hops in there and wanted the yeast cake!

I know it'll be fine (it's going great already after 2 hours) but instincts told me to leave it so I hope it'll be ok.

Should be pushing 8% if it finishes!

K