My first IPA - update

[bowser]

Greetings everyone, original post: https://www.coopers.com.au/coopers-forum/topic/14926/

 

I wanted once more thank everyone involved with helping me with my recipe and share the journey to my final (first successful) beer. I have shared it with friends and friends of friends and have gotten a very good feedback. Some even claim it is the best DIY beer they have tried. I don´t know about that, but I am quite happy with the result and thought that maybe someone out there will learn something from my experience and maybe even make their own twist to it. I will definitely try it again.

The beer turned out just bitter enough for you to still want a next one and with an ABV between 6.4-6.9 (depending on if I got the 0.5% from the carbonation drops) it has quite the kick. I would maybe try to tweek it even further with another boil of hops or dry hop addition to maybe try to get more citrusy aroma/flavors into it, but if I still ended up with the same results as I did now I would not complain. Would be happy to hear from you guys if you have any comments or suggestion regarding to obtain that.

 

I thought I would go step by step through our process and show the end results. As mentioned before in the previous post we chose mostly to follow Lusty´s instructions that we also modified a bit as we went along. We did for instance not risk using both yeast kits and stuck to Doomys recommendation of just using the safale us-05.

The boil part went uncomplicated till it was time to pitch the yeast and the temperatures were to high. Never before using partial boils with extract kits this was one thing that I did not take into account, and unfortunately I thought that by living in the Northern hemisphere this would not pose a big problem by just using tap water alone. By the time we reached about 20L the wort was still quite hot at around 30 degrees and without thinking about possible contamination I turned to store bought ice cubes. I learned later that this could be a disaster in thoughts of contamination, but luckily the beer gods where gentle to us as the final product turned very nice but the mark was at 24L instead of 23L, but at least the temperature then was at 20 degrees and we decided to pitch the safale us-05 yeast and seal. OG: 1.055

We let it stay in our kithen on a seperate counter and covered it up with blankets to prevent it from daylight. After 7 days we added the remaining 50g of Cascade hops using a mesh bag and a stainless steel ball to make it sink with good effect. But even so the bag eventually floated. We decided to dry hop in the primary and extended this period to 2 weeks instead of the 1 week suggested as the SG continued to decrease through this time so total fermentation at room temperature was 3 weeks. First week after fermentation OG was 1.1010 and a week later it was 1.007. We continued measuring the SG and when it was steady at 1.007 for 3 days we considered the beer to be ready for bottling. We were lucky with the temperatures and it steadily showed about 18-20 degrees celcius on the fermenter. Problem was that it was quite cloudy when measuring the specific gravity. It looked like this after 3 weeks in winter room temp:

Very cloudy and not something I would willingly drink, but tasting it had exactly what I would assume a good IPA should taste like. We decided to venture down the road of cold crashing. In fear of messing with contamination we decided not to remove the dry hop mesh bag and put the whole fermenter in the fridge. We decided to keep it in the fridge for 5 days and and saw stunning results:

We decided then to bottle and due to the sediment falling down we did not want to risk using the tap but bought an automated siphon for this task.

As I think I mentioned before we used the Coopers PET bottles 0,5L and Grolsch glass bottles 0,475L. We followed Beeblebrox´s advice with carbonation drops and actually tried both variants. We used 1.5 drops for the 0.5L and risked to use just 1 per 0,475L Grolsch bottle. Luckily we had more PET bottles than glass bottles as the 1 per 0,475L was a bit on the low side and the beer ended up undercarbonated and had poor head retention. Taste was also different, but still very good. Using 1.5 drops for the 0.5L bottles was perfect. The end result looking like this:

So to sum up:

Let it ferment for a week, add dry hop addition, wait another 2 weeks, cold crash for 6 days, bottle.

 

Bottoms up,

Cheers mates and thanks once again for all advice.

 

- bowser & peaches

 

 

 

[Ale.Coholic]

G'day Bowser,

 

It looks good and made me thirsty even though it's 8AM here atm!

 

Have you tried Punk IPA? If so, was similar?

 

Cheers,

 

Luke

[Otto Von Blotto]

Good to hear it turned out well mate! Yes you will have the extra ABV from the carb drops. If they fermented and you have bubbles, you have the extra alcohol too. Can't have bubbles without the added alc unless it's force carbed in a keg.

 

I would have used two packets of yeast in a big beer like that. It's not a risk - it's beneficial. The more sugars there are in it, the more yeast you need to successfully ferment it. Obviously it did ferment with just one pack, but pitching the proper amount of yeast in the first place is preferable. As you noted, the fermentation took a long time and that is most likely why.

 

Isn't cold crashing great?! I do it on every batch although I have a dedicated fridge and my brews aren't usually that cloudy beforehand, but I think the benefits of it are worth doing. The tap would be fine to use for bottling though as the sediment compacts below it, and if you bottle it cold it creates minimal disturbance of the trub. Certainly I've never had any issues with trub getting through the tap much at bottling time, although I do transfer it all to another fermenter for bulk priming, so if any does get dragged through it's so diluted it isn't noticeable anyway.

 

Cheers

 

Kelsey