We decided it was about time to make something quite a bit hoppier than our two previous beers, so we roamed the web for the best recipe. This is what we found. A single malt, single hop IPA, price winning beer – when Gahr Smith Gahrsen brewed it anyway.
November 3rd. We made a yeast starter from 150g spray malt and 1.5L water. A good stir once in a while until we fridged it in the morning on the 6th.
November 6th. Brew day. Johannes and Marius started out after work, I jumped in later, after Johannes had left. Meshing went fine, with stable (on a geophysical scale) mash temperature – 66, 62, 64, 66, 66 celsius. They used 11.5L of preheated water for sparging, put this in a fermenting tub, dipped in the water several times and let the water run out. Heating the wort still took a long time, and at 20:05 it started boiling. Put in hops according to recipe at 90, 15, 5 minutes. Forgot to account for difference in alpha acids in recipe, but in the right direction though. This may become a very hoppy brew! Just as we like it.
After cooling we added the yeast and gave the fermenter tub a good ol’ shake. We ended up with 14L of beer in the fermenter, quite a bit less than in the recipe – Maybe we should have used more water for sparging. However, the BG was measured to 1.053, so we decided in the process not to add more water, and rather have the correct alcohol content.
November 13th. Moved the beer to a second fermenter, added more hops. Had a taste – delicious hoppy kick!
November 25th. Bottling day. Final result is 22×0.5L=11L of beer. Primed with 1dl of sugar in 4dl of boiling water. FG=1.017, which gives ABV=4.7%. But FG was measured after adding priming sugar, if this influences much, it means alcohol content is a bit higher.
Cheers,
Algot, Marius and Johannes
Beer label.