Out of the Bottle: English IPA

After nearly two months of fermenting, dry hopping and bottle conditioning (not to mention having to pose for pictures while being brewed), my English India Pale Ale is ready to drink. Time to find out if the beer was worth the wait.

I'll say upfront that I have to be in the right mood to drink a 100+ IBU bitter-bomb. That said, I like a hop-forward beer where the hop flavors and aromas dominate the proceedings. To that end, my English IPA has a moderate bittering addition, followed by three heavy flavor and aroma ones. The end result is a modest 50 IBUs of bitterness, but a heavy dose of flavor and aroma. At 1.008, the Final Gravity is quite a bit lower than the 1.016 my Qbrew software predicted (darn technology). As a result, the ABV comes to a hefty 7.4%. The beer pours about as brilliant a pale amber hue as you can get without filtering. It has a dense eggshell head on top that sticks around and leaves decent lacing.

As I wished, the nose is greeted with a healthy dose of fresh floral, fruity and earthy aromas. Black tea, lemongrass, pepper and a bit of orange marmalade are all present. The hop aromas blend nicely into the beer's flavor. Bitterness comes with a strong, but not overpowering black tea and pepper bite. Malts are subdued, but bring grape-nuts and biscuit flavors to the table. The bitterness lingers long after the last sip. The alcohol is well masked, but does add a touch of warmth going down. The carbonation aids the bitterness and is a touch higher than I was shooting for. The rest of the body is slick and oily from the hops.

I'm quite happy with how this one turned out. Perhaps I'd dial back the carbonation a little next time. The rest of the recipe is a keeper.

Comments

Kitchen Brewing Part 3: Sparge and Boil

The mash emerges from the oven. Now that we're finished with Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, it's time to Sparge. As you can see from the photo, the grains have absorbed a lot of liquid. In a traditional all-grain setup, your Mash Tun has a valve at the bottom to release the first running of Wort. The grains are then rinsed with the sparge water to extract any remaining sugars. My stove-top method doesn't afford such luxury, so a different method is called for. The grains have gained a little weight. There are a couple of choices at this point. One choice is to lift the grain bag out of Pot A and place it into the sparge water in Pot B to steep for 10-15 minutes or more. The other is to lift the grain bag up, put a colander under it and slowly pour the sparge water through the grains into the original pot. I prefer the former, because I get a better extraction rate from my grains. All that absorption means that the grains weigh a lot more than they did going i

Kitchen Brewing Part 2: The Mash

Always start your session with a beer. Now that the equipment is together from Part 1 , it's time to start brewing. I'll be brewing an English India Pale Ale for my demo batch. The beer's details will be out in a future blog. Ingredients ready to go. I'm lucky to have a homebrew shop with a grain mill, so I've crushed my grains at the store. The hops have also been measured out ahead of time to keep things simple. You don't have to do this, but I recommend it. My setup. My stove-top setup is pretty simple. Two kettles, a grain bag and a metal spatula are pretty much it. I also like using a hop bag (available for around $5.00), but it's completely optional. If you're doing all-grain brewing, canning pots work best for batches of 2.5 gallons or less. Anything larger and you'll be battling spill-overs. They also work well for partial-mash batches of up to 5 gallons, where you can top off your wort after the boil. We hav

Saving Money: Simple Yeast Culturing

A few members of the family I just finished racking my English IPA to a secondary fermentor. As part of the process, I saved some of the yeast in the primary for future use. Here then, is the start of a series of articles on yeast culturing. Back in the "good old days," homebrewers didn't have a ton of yeast choices. In some cases, brewers would even use bread yeast from the baking section of the grocery store. In practice, you hydrated the packet of dry yeast you got at the homebrew or grocery store and pitched it. The packets were cheap and worked, but there wasn't much variety to be had. Nowadays, there are several dozen strains available. While a few strains are still dry , most are liquids that come in pitchable tubes , or smack-packs . The liquid yeasts give consistent results and provide tremendous variety to finished beers, but are pricey. If you only use each pack, or tube once, you will quickly discover that yeast makes up 15%, or more of the cost

Colorado Kitchen Brew

Search This Blog