Today we finished our second IPA.
In creating our second IPA, we chose to tweak the recipe that we had used for our first IPA. This could have been a daunting decision to make. There are really only four ingredients in a standard beer: water, malt, hops, yeast. Of those four, (besides using a water filter) you can really only purchase variations on three. Of those three (unless you have your own crazy-ass yeast) you can really only mess around with two: malt and hops. Of those two, we decided to mess with the hops. Which brings us to this next sub category...
Hops: The beer that we are brewing incorporates three different types of hops added at six different times throughout the wort making process. The first two hops are added at the 30 and 40 minute mark during the boil. Hops added at this interval are primarily responsible for bittering the beer. Since Jeb and I like hoppy beers, we decided not to mess with the first two hop additions since they are two of the more bitter hops that one could buy at our local HBS. The last four hop additions are all the same hop and they are primarily responsible for aroma and "character" building. Those seemed like the ones to mess with.
The benefit of only changing the character hops is that you can do side-by-side taste tests between each of the IPAs and better understand the affects of the hops on the beer. At least that was our mentality. The other bummer is that that kinda of data gathering would take a very long time as each IPA takes about a month before you can even drink it!
I guess brewing is a "hurry up and wait" hobby...I'll keep my mountain bike around for instant gratification.
Some pictures of brew day. For more, check out the Tumblr site feed on the top right of this blog.
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| All the brewing materials. |
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| I really like how it layers...although it's a little gross at first.... |
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