Brew 5 – American IPA with a twist

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Well homebrew 5 as we shall call it kicked off on the weekend. Its normally a Saturday or Sunday process because of the time involved but because I was busy both days I decided to do this one on a Friday night. Thinking this was going to take me all night so wasn’t especially looking forward to it but then again, this was a proper experimental brew where I wasn’t going to stick to the recipe.

I decided upon a sort of IPA recipe but I decided I wanted to increase the EBC to make it dark in colour. I did something unusual as well in that I used four different hops and not necessarily hops that would compliment each other. I used Chinook, Galaxy, Fuggles and Amarillo. I also plan to dry hop with one of these two, potentially the Amarillo.

I did have a little panic when I got home and that was that I didn’t have any yeast but upon checking I have quite a few packets, however now I’m concerned they are inactive because the beer is not bubbling two days after. There could be a couple of reasons, first its too cold. The fridge is holding about 16c so it should be about right, secondly that I have the dodgy lid on the fermenter and I think its more likely that. I’ll look for a krausen forming and if it doesn’t I’ll buy some fresh yeast and re-pitch if need be. I’ve learnt not to panic over the years.

The whole process was actually quite smooth and I only used dried malts and didn’t really bother steeping anything. I just want to complete this quest of mastering at least one beer this year. From start to finish I reckon it took me about 2 and a half hours, which sounds like a massive investment but I did have dinner and cleaned up as I went along so I sort of think this was particularly fast.

Anyway my first experimental of the year. My full recipe is below. Fingers crossed on this one.

Light Dry Malt            0.7kg
Dark Dry Malt             0.7kg
Chinook                      8g
Amarillo                      8g
Galaxy                         4g
Fuggles                       5g
Safale 04

EBC – 37.1
IBU – 59.3

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