Rainy Day (B)IPA

We had another rainy day this last Tuesday - DC in late August is a stormy place - and without much else to do with our evening, Luke and I decided to get a little ambitious. We hauled a little more of our gear out of storage and managed for the first time to brew two unrelated beers in sequence.

The first beer through was a repeat of the by-the-book saison we’ve made a few times now, and I figured there isn’t much point in writing it up by itself. The exciting thing about this wort isn’t the brewing itself, but what we’re doing with it. We recently obtained a 10 gallon barrel from a kind soul in the DC Homebrewers Facebook group and tossed in the finished beer from our last saison brew that we fermented with BE-256. That only accounted for about 4 gallons, and it isn’t good for barrels to sit unfilled, so we brewed up the last bit of wort from that kit and added a little more BE-256. All that’s left now is to forget about it for the next six months or so and hope something good comes out.

We’ve also been meaning to brew another IPA, and I’m excited about this one for a few reasons. First is that this is one of the first times we’ve really flown blind; we didn’t even base this brew off a recipe, just a broad style guideline in Brewfather and the grains, hops, and yeast we had available. Second is that, by necessity, this ended up fairly Belgian in grain bill and yeast, but we’re using a very American hop schedule. In my mind, that makes this just experimental enough to be exciting without seriously risking a batch we’d rather not drink.

Going into this, we had the grains left over from the hefeweizen we brewed a week ago. We should have had 6 lbs of Pilsen malt and 4 lbs of white wheat malt. What we had was more like 4 lbs and change of Pilsen and a dog that enjoys eating malted grain. Suspicious. 

We also had leftover grain from the saison kit, which we used more or less all of. We’ve still got about 9 oz of Caramel 20L kicking around, and I’m sure we’ll find a use for it.

I’m always curious to see the difference in color between unfermented wort and finished beer. Sometimes they get darker, sometimes they get lighter, and I still don’t feel like I can reliably predict which way they’re going to break or how that will translate into flavor. This wort was a bit lighter than the saison but still quite a bit darker than most of the IPAs we’ve made thanks to the Caramel malt. My thumb-to-the-horizon prediction is that it will end up a bit more biscuit-y than I usually go for in my IPAs, but I’m hoping that the hops we picked out will give us enough fruit and citrus to break through that.

The same kind soul who gave us the barrel also donated a large number of hops to our cause. We picked two - as tempting as they all were, we wanted to be able to pick out the hop flavors and not just “hop” flavor. We picked Galena as a bittering hop, for our late addition, and for half of the whirlpool. In addition to sharing a name with the small town in Illinois where our dad grew up, Galena has plenty of alpha acids for bittering and, in later additions, allegedly has flavors of citrus and blackcurrant. For the other half of the whirlpool addition, we picked Amarillo, which has (in our experience) a powerful orange aroma. 

We haven’t picked out a dry hop schedule just yet, but most likely it will be a combination of the same two hops. Again, we want to taste the hops we picked out, not “hops” generally.

At this point, it’s almost not worth going into the fairly standard (by now) brewing process we used. There weren’t any special steps or fancy footwork involved in either beer. The only thing worth mentioning is the extra work involved in brewing these beers sequentially. We were a little nervous about how this would go after a rough attempt early on at a parti-gyle brew (we are not fans of cleaning out mash tuns and carboys at 2 in the morning), but this went smoothly.

The trick was bringing up another kettle and operating with three vessels instead of two. We used our regular kettle as a hot liquor tank, mashed our grains for the saison, and then by the time we were boiling we were ready to empty out the mash tun and mash in for the IPA. This meant we were cooling the saison wort while we were sparging the IPA grains (a little 5 gallon pot stood in for a proper lauter tun), and we could get the IPA boiling as soon as the saison was done.

One of the big questions here is how much saison character will come through in the beer when it’s done. We used Lallemand Belle Saison yeast because it just happened to be what we had on hand, which is new to us. From what I’ve read, it runs toward citrus flavors rather than heavy saison funk, and if that’s true I think it will play nicely with the hops we picked out. If we like it, we might play around with this IPA-saison combo (India Pale saison?) in the future to see if we can tease out the best of both worlds. 

Stats:

Volume in Fermentor: 5.5 Gallons

Starting Gravity: 1.072

Water:

• 5 Gallons Step Mash
• 4 Gallons Batch Sparge

Fermentables:

• 4 lbs 4 oz Pilsen Malt
• 4 lbs White Wheat Malt
• 3 lbs 2 oz Belgian Pale Malt
• 12 oz Caramel Malt 20L
• 7 oz Acidulated Malt*

Bittering/Flavoring Additions:

• 0.75 oz Galena @ 60 minutes
• 0.5 oz Galena @ 15 minutes
• 0.5 oz Galena @ Whirlpool
• 0.5 oz Amarillo @ Whirlpool
• Dry hop TBD

Other:

• 1.25g Gypsum*
• 0.8g Epsom Salt*
• 1 tsp Yeast Nutrient
• 1 tsp Irish Moss

Microbes:

• 1 pkt Lallemand Belle Saison

Schedule:

• Mash for 60 minutes at 150F
• Drain and batch sparge for 20 minutes at 170F
• Boil for 60 minutes, adding hops, nutrient, and irish moss according to schedule
• Cool, transfer to fermenter, oxidate and add liquid yeast
• Ferment for 14 days until primary fermentation finishes
• Cold crash for 7 days, adding dry hop once cold
• Package and force carbonate

Notes:

* These additions are specific to Maryland-area water chemistry, calculated using EZ Water Calculator