Belgian IPA

[sven945]

My first brew in a little while, also will be my first with liquid yeast and my first brew of my own creation.

Aiming for 12 litres
2.5kg pale ale
150g aromatic malt (smells lovely! I can tell I'll be using this again).
350g sugar (Not quite sure why, but it was in the recipe I used as a base and I forgot to delete it and up the pale malt, never mind).

No bittering hops (as suggested by my homebrew shop) but 20g of centennial, simcoe and cascade at 20 minutes, then 15g of each at flameout. WLP500 yeast to make it interesting, then same again dry hopping (using up supplies. May not be worth it, I might just decide to double up the flameout hops and not bother dry hopping). May be a disaster, but I'll learn something from it I'm sure!

Mashing at 66ºC right now. I think I started with a bit too much water, but never mind. I'll just sparge with slightly less, but I've had to top up my last two brews in the FV so it might be fine afterall.

 

[IainM]

That sounds lush. Let us know how it ends up.

 

[sven945]

Thanks! I'm excited, to tell you the truth. It's very cloudy already (and the WLP500 will only make it worse) so I'll have to put it in secondary for a little bit probably. I should have recirculated the wort but I couldn't be bothered.

Just about to put my hops in (it feels weird not having any in from the start). All gone well so far I think.

 

[Simonh82]

I made a Belgian IPA a while ago. It was great but does take some getting used to as there is a bit of a battle between the hops and the strong Belgian yeast character. I did bitter mine with Chinook to about 80IBU but also used lots of late and dry hops.

After a couple of months in the bottle the hops and yeast have settled down and they complemented each other nicely.

The sugar will be to dry out the beer. Most Belgian beers finish very dry, even when they start with a high gravity. This is done though a combination of highly attenuating yeast and sugar additions.

If you can control your fermentation temperature then I would recommend starting at about 18°C then bringing it up to 25-28°C after 3-4 days to help with attenuation and to build the Belgian character from the yeast.

 

[sven945]

Cheers. I'll definitely keep an eye on the temperature. I should try and get a small fan if I can, to keep the air circulating as well as wrapping it in a damp towel.

 

[sven945]

Pitched last night (directly into the wort because it's only a small batch), sat down with a glass of wine and realised I'd completely forgotten to aerate. And I poured it into the FV while hot earlier in the day so it won't have got oxygen from pouring in either. Oops. So I spent five minutes thrashing around with my stirring paddle.

No activity yet from what I can see, which is annoying. Hopefully it'll just be a slow starer, but I'm aware I may have to take action in case it stalls in the next week or so.


EDIT: Just had a sneaky look under the lid and there's nothing visible, but there's definitely some Belgian smells going on, so that's reassuring!

 

[sven945]

First gravity sample (it's just a wonderful coincidence that it means I have to taste some) and it tastes good! The belgian flavours are coming through, and I'm glad I didn't put any bittering hops because I think they'd be clashing with the flavours from the yeast. There's a bit of alcohol harshness but nowhere near as much as previous brews, probably because I was careful to only pitch when the wort had cooled properly. It's 1009 so I think it's nearly there, after only five days.