It's been over a month since the last posting. If it makes you feel any better, it's been a month since a home brew has been finished too!
In the past 5 weeks, we have brewed 3 beers. Starting with Rogue Dead Guy clone that Brendan put together. This was our first time using a yeast primer and I'm not quite sure that I like that process. Basically, you place the dry yeast into a bowl of water and let it re-activate. Then you add wort from your carboy until the yeast = the same temperature as the wort, then you pour the yeast into the carboy...I prefer the dry ale yeast...pour and play. This beer is probably done, but I'm waiting for batch-master Brendan to give the word to bottle (it's been sitting in a carboy for about 4 weeks).
Second was a Black IPA that I dubbed "Jeremiah Black IPA". It was a recipe that was passed along to me by a fellow home brewer, Jeremiah, at a mutual friend's birthday party. The meeting was serendipitous and so is the beer so far. In a week and a half, we'll be drinking that sweet dark nectar. So far it has a great taste, and has been described as "complex". I think it tastes chocolaty...if that's even a word.
Jeremiah Black IPA was the first batch that I thought that I had lost. I thought this because my calculations indicated that our final gravity should have equaled 1.018-1.020. Our gravity was holding at 1.030. If you haven't reached final gravity then you still have fermentables in the beer. Adding priming sugars for bottling to a beer that isn't at FG will equal disaster. Your bottles will more than likely explode and you will need a large mop to clean up all that wasted beer. So I was high 10 points and the beer wasn't going anywhere for 5 days...I called my local HBS and they suggested adding Biotin (yeast food) in hopes of jump starting the yeast to finish off the batch. If that didn't work...I would have to pour out the batch. So I arrived at the HBS to pick up my biotin and we recalculated all of the numbers...multiple recalculations indicated the same thing...the beer was done. Apparently, all of my fermentables were gone despite not being at the mathematical final gravity....phew...so we bottled the next day. No explosions yet. Lesson learned: when calculating FG, only add fermentables to the equation. Batch saved.
Around this time, I began drafting an original IPA using a fantastic website called hopville.com. The IPA recipe that we had been manipulating was good, but I was kinda done with it, 40 bottles is enough to get sick of anything, and so I needed a change. I started researching all of the ingredients that I had in mind...first start was to use less dry malt extract and to use more crystal and specialty grains. I chose lighter crystal and specialty grains (20L-30L) basically creating a beer that was more gold to copper in color, rather than the ale colored IPAs to date. Then came the fun part...hops.
The hops took some crafting. Using a hop boiling schedule graph, and a hop chart with characteristics of each hop, I set out creating my own hop schedule. In short, the aroma, flavor, and bittering characteristics of hops are brought to full potential depending on the amount of time that they are boiled. Hops boiled for 60+ minutes are going to be used primarily for bittering as the bittering oils tend to reach fruition at 60 minutes. Hops used primarily for flavor should be boiled around 20-30 minutes, and hops used primarily for aroma are boiled for 5-15 minutes. Any hops added later (dry hopping) will be primarily adding aroma. Knowing this kind of stuff can be helpful when you want to create your own beer.
I knew that I wanted a very bitter IPA (100+ IBU), that had citrus and floral aromas and flavors...So I choose the most bitter bittering hops, the most citrusy and floral aroma hops, and a great, all-purpose, and unique flavoring hop, Simcoe. We added almost half of a pound of hops to this 5 gallon batch. We will also dry hop this batch twice! The first dry hop was during the cool down that occurred post boil, and the second dry hopping will be after primary fermentation is complete and the beer has been transferred into secondary.
This batch, hopefully to be dubbed "Rapture IPA", was brewed on the supposed Rapture, May 21st, 2011. We won't officially call it the "Rapture IPA" until we confirm that it doesn't suck...although that would be seeming appropriate if it did. So far it's off without a hitch! The wort tasted awesome and so we have high hopes for its development over the next two weeks in fermentation and the next 4.5 until we can drink it out of bottles for the first time. The true judgment day!
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