Hopping Mad

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steve crawshaw
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Hopping Mad

Post by steve crawshaw »

Inspired by Steve Wilcox's Trashy Blonde I decided to brew a hoppy, fairly low strength IPA, using up the half used packs of hops I had in the freezer. I also wanted better balance than my last Timmy Taylor effort, so went for some extra malts. I devised my own recipe with reference to the wheeler book.

For a 23 litre brew:

* Pale Malt (Maris Otter) 3500g
* Melanoidin Malt 400g (this is meant to give a maltier taste to all beers)
* Crystal Malt 100g
* Wheat Malt 200g (for head retention)


As I was going for maximum hop character I decided to try mash hopping. See this thread on Jimsbeerkit for more info. My mash tun consists of one young's fermenting vat inside another with the inside one's bottom drilled with many little holes. So there is some "dead space" at the bottom of the tun. This is where I put 20g of Challenger hops.

I added filtered and treated rainwater at 75C, giving me a mash temp of 69C dropping to 67C by the end of the mash. Treatment consisted of 10g CaSO4 and 2g MgSO4 in the mash.

I also tried a new method of sparging, by using a plastic disc from the lid of a bird seed tub, drilled with many small holes. This is placed on top of the grain with the sparge water (80C) poured gently over the top. This has the advantage that the water is evenly distributed over the grain and also you can see when the water is raised above the grain because it can be seen in contact with the surface of the disk. There's a video on my blog that shows what I mean.

Sparge Video

At the start of the boil I added 20 g Styrian Goldings. After 1h 20 m I added 20g of Progress hops and 3g Irish moss. When it had finished boiling at 90 mins I added 25g Motueka and 43g Fuggles after dropping the temperature to 85C. I let this steep for 50 minutes. I force cooled using an immersion coil and water bath to ~25C and pitched American Ale yeast 1056 from Wyeast after aerating by pouring between vats. I ended up with about 19L of wort, but as it was at 1042 OG I decided not to add any water. I will ferment as close to 20C as I can and bung it in the secondary pressure barrel when stable. Might be ready for our next meeting...
I like to keep a bottle of stimulant handy in case I see a snake, which I also keep handy.
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