Hazy Double IPA - New Adventures in Water Chemistry and Dissolved Oxygen
There are some benefits to being a home brewer over a commercial brewer, and I think we often don't stop to appreciate them enough in our quest to replicate a professional brewery on a minuscule scale. For example, I can brew a pomegranate molasses dubbel and not have to worry about selling 5 hectolitres of it. Also, I can pour a terrible beer down the drain (which luckily hasn't happened yet) and not have to think how I will pay my staff, my rent or for my ingredients. Even better, there can be an international pandemic and instead of brewing less we can brew even more! However the main plus as I see it comes with hoppy beer. And that is how much control we have over its quality.
If the stars ever align and a large suitcase of unmarked bills comes into my possession and I feel like investing them terribly by starting a brewery, my main concern would be hoppy beer. In this equally wonderful and terrifying daydream scenario, I think I wouldn't let my hoppy beer out of my sight. By all means take a 750ml case of my imaginary mixed ferm sour and sell it to trade. Be my guest with the fictional barrel aged imperial stout, Cave Direct here we come. But the vast majority of the UK bar managing populace just doesn't respect hoppy beer enough to be trusted with it, hypothetical or otherwise.
It is approaching a decade of me working, drinking and hanging about in craft beer bars and the horror stories I could tell you would make your alpha acids isomerise. IPAs kept ambient for months on end, cans of DIPA hype-juice sold full price when they are six months old, partial kegs with mouldy coupler seats, lines so infected they have chunks in, cellars with a foot of stale foul-smelling water, rats, roaches, filth*.
*DISCLAIMER* I hasten to add none of these have been places I've worked at, as I've been blessed with employers that care deeply about beer quality and education. Rather, once you work in the industry, you see a lot of other peoples cellars - some lovely, some less so. If you think I'm talking about your bar, you should probably sort your shit out*
This is why bars like Small Bar in Bristol or Friends of Ham in Leeds have such incredible tap lists every time you go - brewers trust them with their product. They are rare. How can brewers trust other unknown craft beer bars with a product like an IPA that is so dependant on how it's cared for, when a sizeable percentage don't seem to care at all? In an age where reputation is everything, Untappd, RateBeer and word of mouth are the three horseman of the brewers apocalypse.
So it's established, the worst thing you can do for hoppy beer is let it out of your sight, where god knows what could happen to it. When we make beer at home, we know it's fresh. We know exactly how old it is and how long it's been in a keg or bottle. We know where the ingredients came from, we know how long to condition our beer for, we quickly learn when different beers reach their peak and we know to keep it cold until that peak arrives. If it tastes like gash, it is without doubt our fault. And there is something beautiful in that.
If the stars ever align and a large suitcase of unmarked bills comes into my possession and I feel like investing them terribly by starting a brewery, my main concern would be hoppy beer. In this equally wonderful and terrifying daydream scenario, I think I wouldn't let my hoppy beer out of my sight. By all means take a 750ml case of my imaginary mixed ferm sour and sell it to trade. Be my guest with the fictional barrel aged imperial stout, Cave Direct here we come. But the vast majority of the UK bar managing populace just doesn't respect hoppy beer enough to be trusted with it, hypothetical or otherwise.
It is approaching a decade of me working, drinking and hanging about in craft beer bars and the horror stories I could tell you would make your alpha acids isomerise. IPAs kept ambient for months on end, cans of DIPA hype-juice sold full price when they are six months old, partial kegs with mouldy coupler seats, lines so infected they have chunks in, cellars with a foot of stale foul-smelling water, rats, roaches, filth*.
*DISCLAIMER* I hasten to add none of these have been places I've worked at, as I've been blessed with employers that care deeply about beer quality and education. Rather, once you work in the industry, you see a lot of other peoples cellars - some lovely, some less so. If you think I'm talking about your bar, you should probably sort your shit out*
This is why bars like Small Bar in Bristol or Friends of Ham in Leeds have such incredible tap lists every time you go - brewers trust them with their product. They are rare. How can brewers trust other unknown craft beer bars with a product like an IPA that is so dependant on how it's cared for, when a sizeable percentage don't seem to care at all? In an age where reputation is everything, Untappd, RateBeer and word of mouth are the three horseman of the brewers apocalypse.
Say my make-believe brewery did sell to one of these bars that don't give a rats arse. The knob they've employed to manage the place just buys whatever he wants to drink, regardless of dates or stock holding. He has a cellar full of imperial stouts so they can 'age', even though all of them are past their peak and his bar sells one keg of imperial stout every 3 months. He might move through this stock in a few years, if he stops buying more, which he won't. He's bought in a few kegs of my IPA, forgetting he has a tap takeover next week, so my beer sits in his cellar and is quickly forgotten. Hopefully it's cold, but let's be honest, it probably isn't. If we are really lucky he cleans his couplers, but I'd say the outlook is dim.
One keg goes on a few weeks later in okay condition but when it kicks, he forgets he bought two kegs and puts something else on. It's a Friday night and he's in a rush so no time to clean the line. He finds it again on Monday when he does the stock take, tells himself he should put that on soon. He tells himself this every Monday for four months. Finally, after realising he needs an IPA for the weekend, he gets the beer on; my IPA has gone from straw yellow to a muddy brown, its nose of grapefruit and lime now smell like caramel and cardboard.
Most of his customers aren't informed or beer nerdy enough to know that I didn't brew my beer badly, but rather knob-face isn't doing his job properly. Many of his customers are trying my beer for the first time and that impression sticks with them - "oh I tried one of theirs a while back, not for me". Some of his customers rate the beer on a little orange app - an app many bar managers reference when choosing what beer to buy. Maybe one of his customers post in a Craft Beer Facebook group saying how bad it was, further putting more potential customers off. My beer ratings plummet, my brewery's reputation nose dives and with that so do my sales. My wife leaves me, I can't afford my mortgage, two weeks later I dive into an FV full of hot caustic to end it all. It could happen to anyone.
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| Words to live by. |
So it's established, the worst thing you can do for hoppy beer is let it out of your sight, where god knows what could happen to it. When we make beer at home, we know it's fresh. We know exactly how old it is and how long it's been in a keg or bottle. We know where the ingredients came from, we know how long to condition our beer for, we quickly learn when different beers reach their peak and we know to keep it cold until that peak arrives. If it tastes like gash, it is without doubt our fault. And there is something beautiful in that.
So my long winded and rambling point is; there are quite a few pros to homebrewing that you lose on the big scale. More power to us.
That being said, our commercial brothers and sisters have one big advantage in hoppy beer; closed transfer. As I'm sure you are already aware, oxygen is the enemy of all fermented beer, but none more so that lupulin rich IPAs and DIPAs which generally go to shit way quicker (technical term). Closed transfer is the process of transferring beer from your fermenter to packaging without any exposure to the dreaded O₂, usually using CO₂ to purge kegs and pump it about the gaff. At the homebrew level it would require me investing in some more high tech equipment like conical fermenters which I will do, but probably when we have more space than a small West London flat. One day, Grainfather and glycol, I'm coming for you.
I at least have the advantage that I keg. Bottle conditioning IPA has a major downside in that the secondary fermentation will only clean up around 30% of the oxygen in the bottle, letting the remaining 70% wreck havoc with your beer, making it brown, yucky and sad. The downside I have is that I ferment in glass carboys like some 1970s grandad in his shed. I am praying that my beers won't be lightstruck (very little light comes down to our basement flat) and I can get them into the keg in reasonable condition.
I have a rare evening to myself and so, almost on a whim, I have decided to make a hazy double IPA. I could waffle about how New England IPAs have taken the world by storm and regurgitate some facts about Heady Topper, but if you've got this far, you probably know what you're talking about. London Ale III, wheat, oats, yada yada.
A more compelling element to this style is their water chemistry. This has for the longest time terrified me, but in actuality it is really just paying attention to what you are working with; either getting your tap water tested or in my case, er, reading the label of the bottle water I'm using..! Eventually I would love to graduate to reverse osmosis filtering my tap water, but for the time being I am using Co Ops finest 5 litre bottles, which helpfully have the mineral deposits listened on the label. Inputting these details into BeerSmith gives a result that really isn't as bad as it could be. Perhaps a little low in magnesium but our chloride to sulphate ratio is pretty balanced.
As this recipe will be a big hazy New England thing, I'm pushing the chloride up to 2:1 and seeing what good it does. Hopefully it will result in that trademark softness that the best hazies have, while subduing hop bitterness. As always, there is a great Brulosophy on water treatment with NEIPAs, proving apparently it doesn't really matter. Hmmmm.
As the beer was on a whim, this isn't really a recipe development post, rather a record of what I decided on so we can balance this against what the beer tastes like. The basis for this recipe is really just taking my fairly dialled in pale ale recipe and turning everything up to eleven; Maris Otter as a base, a bit of wheat malt, a bit of flaked oats, a touch of acid malt to get us to a pH of 5.2. I decided on S04 for yeast as its a nice fruity English strain and as its spur of the moment I don't have any suitable liquid yeasts available.
Formatted, the beer recipe looks like this:
Aroma
Flavour
Mouthfeel
Drinkability
That being said, our commercial brothers and sisters have one big advantage in hoppy beer; closed transfer. As I'm sure you are already aware, oxygen is the enemy of all fermented beer, but none more so that lupulin rich IPAs and DIPAs which generally go to shit way quicker (technical term). Closed transfer is the process of transferring beer from your fermenter to packaging without any exposure to the dreaded O₂, usually using CO₂ to purge kegs and pump it about the gaff. At the homebrew level it would require me investing in some more high tech equipment like conical fermenters which I will do, but probably when we have more space than a small West London flat. One day, Grainfather and glycol, I'm coming for you.
I at least have the advantage that I keg. Bottle conditioning IPA has a major downside in that the secondary fermentation will only clean up around 30% of the oxygen in the bottle, letting the remaining 70% wreck havoc with your beer, making it brown, yucky and sad. The downside I have is that I ferment in glass carboys like some 1970s grandad in his shed. I am praying that my beers won't be lightstruck (very little light comes down to our basement flat) and I can get them into the keg in reasonable condition.
I have a rare evening to myself and so, almost on a whim, I have decided to make a hazy double IPA. I could waffle about how New England IPAs have taken the world by storm and regurgitate some facts about Heady Topper, but if you've got this far, you probably know what you're talking about. London Ale III, wheat, oats, yada yada.
A more compelling element to this style is their water chemistry. This has for the longest time terrified me, but in actuality it is really just paying attention to what you are working with; either getting your tap water tested or in my case, er, reading the label of the bottle water I'm using..! Eventually I would love to graduate to reverse osmosis filtering my tap water, but for the time being I am using Co Ops finest 5 litre bottles, which helpfully have the mineral deposits listened on the label. Inputting these details into BeerSmith gives a result that really isn't as bad as it could be. Perhaps a little low in magnesium but our chloride to sulphate ratio is pretty balanced.
As this recipe will be a big hazy New England thing, I'm pushing the chloride up to 2:1 and seeing what good it does. Hopefully it will result in that trademark softness that the best hazies have, while subduing hop bitterness. As always, there is a great Brulosophy on water treatment with NEIPAs, proving apparently it doesn't really matter. Hmmmm.
As the beer was on a whim, this isn't really a recipe development post, rather a record of what I decided on so we can balance this against what the beer tastes like. The basis for this recipe is really just taking my fairly dialled in pale ale recipe and turning everything up to eleven; Maris Otter as a base, a bit of wheat malt, a bit of flaked oats, a touch of acid malt to get us to a pH of 5.2. I decided on S04 for yeast as its a nice fruity English strain and as its spur of the moment I don't have any suitable liquid yeasts available.
Formatted, the beer recipe looks like this:
New England DIPA v1
(5 litre batch, all grain)
OG = 1.083 FG = 1.026
IBU = 56 SRM = 4.5 ABV = 8.1%
As always, at this point these numbers are estimates, although we did hit our OG bang on with the help of some sugar. Clearly my efficiency isn't as good as the BeerSmith 72%, which I will amend for future recipe development.
OG = 1.083 FG = 1.026
IBU = 56 SRM = 4.5 ABV = 8.1%
As always, at this point these numbers are estimates, although we did hit our OG bang on with the help of some sugar. Clearly my efficiency isn't as good as the BeerSmith 72%, which I will amend for future recipe development.
Ingredients
1000g / 50.6% Pale Malt, Maris Otter (3.0 SRM)
500g / 25.3% Oats, Flaked (1.0 SRM)
250g / 12.7% Wheat Malt (2.0 SRM)
225g / 11.4% Acid Malt (3.0 SRM)
1 packet of SafAle English Ale S-04
1 tsp Yeast Nutrient (Boil 10 mins)
13g Citra (boil 60 mins)
25g Amarillo (boil 5 mins
40g Citra (dry hop day 3 of fermentation)
20g Citra (dry hop day 7 of fermentation)
500g / 25.3% Oats, Flaked (1.0 SRM)
250g / 12.7% Wheat Malt (2.0 SRM)
225g / 11.4% Acid Malt (3.0 SRM)
1 packet of SafAle English Ale S-04
1 tsp Yeast Nutrient (Boil 10 mins)
13g Citra (boil 60 mins)
25g Amarillo (boil 5 mins
40g Citra (dry hop day 3 of fermentation)
20g Citra (dry hop day 7 of fermentation)
The Mash, Sparge and Boil
Good lord two kilos of grain in six litres is a sticky mash, especially with so much oat, but we got there in the end. Smashed our pH bang on, mash started at 67 degrees and came slowly down to 64 over half an hour or so. In retrospect, mashing lower would have helped, as S04 isn't massively attentive and the beer did end up a little sweet.We missed our preboil gravity due to some overzealous sparging but this was quickly rectified using some Demerara sugar I had on hand. This isn't in the recipe, but was about 100g, we weren't off by much.
I would be interested in trying a much shorter boil in future (or maybe even a raw ale?) as the boil did caramelise some sugars and bought our SRM up a little, which isn't really desirable to me with a beer like this.
 |
| Hop explosion - a very active fermentation |
Fermentation and Dry Hop
Fermentation was vigorous 12 hours after pitching, calming down 5 days later to an almost complete stand still - I think a blow off tube would be wiser with a beer this big. My living room is usually 18 degrees or below but the recent hot weather has lifted it closer to 21 degrees, I think perhaps resulting in some fusel alcohol in the finished beer. Rebrewing this when it cools down should solve this. I added 40g of Citra on the second day of a very aggressive fermentation - I wanted an early addition to give the hops the most time in the beer so they lost the green vegetal flavour - but we will lose some aroma compounds that will be removed by the CO₂ degassing. Everything is a compromise.
I then added 20g of Citra a week later, which turns out was a mistake. The beer almost instantly went from a beautiful pale gold to a troubling bronze. Oxygen is killing my beer. Abort, abort. When brewing this again, I think a much larger dry hop charge would be sufficient to avoid tempting fate - although really this comes down to me brewing with a kit not advanced enough to do this kind of beer really well. Yes I am a bad workman, yes I am blaming my tools.
Two weeks after the brew day and I popped the beer in to the fridge to cold crash for a few days. This is something I wouldn't have expected to do as I really want as much protein haze as possible, but the Malt Miller mini kegs I use have a beer line that is around 5mm wide, easily clogging with hop matter. Even after cold crashing, there was lots of hops still in the beer, so in future I will buy a dry hop cylinder to contain my hops. This is a cheaper and less fun option opposed to spending thousands of pounds on corny kegs and an all in one brewing system.
Many recipes would then dry hop in the keg, but as I am using a mini keg, I can't really. Instead I have decided to experiment with Citra Aroma hop extract, something I've seen a lot of pro breweries like Russian River use to good effect. 1ml was the suggested amount so that should be a good place to start. In future I'd love to split a batch, have with aroma extract and half without, as it was hard to pinpoint what was the dry hop and what was the aroma oil. I force carbed the beer at 30 PSI for two days and now it is ready to drink.
I then added 20g of Citra a week later, which turns out was a mistake. The beer almost instantly went from a beautiful pale gold to a troubling bronze. Oxygen is killing my beer. Abort, abort. When brewing this again, I think a much larger dry hop charge would be sufficient to avoid tempting fate - although really this comes down to me brewing with a kit not advanced enough to do this kind of beer really well. Yes I am a bad workman, yes I am blaming my tools.
Two weeks after the brew day and I popped the beer in to the fridge to cold crash for a few days. This is something I wouldn't have expected to do as I really want as much protein haze as possible, but the Malt Miller mini kegs I use have a beer line that is around 5mm wide, easily clogging with hop matter. Even after cold crashing, there was lots of hops still in the beer, so in future I will buy a dry hop cylinder to contain my hops. This is a cheaper and less fun option opposed to spending thousands of pounds on corny kegs and an all in one brewing system.
Many recipes would then dry hop in the keg, but as I am using a mini keg, I can't really. Instead I have decided to experiment with Citra Aroma hop extract, something I've seen a lot of pro breweries like Russian River use to good effect. 1ml was the suggested amount so that should be a good place to start. In future I'd love to split a batch, have with aroma extract and half without, as it was hard to pinpoint what was the dry hop and what was the aroma oil. I force carbed the beer at 30 PSI for two days and now it is ready to drink.
Tasting Notes - 18/06/20
Appearance
Surprisingly bright considering all the hops and protien-rich wheat and oats that went into it, although that is probably the cold crash I did to remove hop matter. Also, thankfully not as brown as I feared - it looked a lot worse in the fermenter but is now an acceptable yellow. Carbonation is dense, solid head retention, a very attractive beer if not quite hop saturated orange juice.
Aroma
For the most part it is classic Citra - loads of lime, lychee, gooseberry, orange - but with a subtle fusel twang at the end. Conditioned for two weeks and over pitched big time, I was hoping this wouldn't be there - oh no. Probably fermentation temperature is to blame. Fresh out of the kegs, the hops cover this well but as the beer warmed, the booze really made itself known. I was right in not worrying about light striking - not a hint of skunk on the nose.
Flavour
Unsure if this is the massive dry hop or the Citra aroma oil but this is hop saturated! Really surprisingly close to a lot of commercial beer I love - I guess there is a reason they call Citra a cheater hop, it really makes anything taste good. Apricot is there, maybe from the Amarillo, but its very citrus led. Also an interesting berry flavour that I more associate with mosaic, no idea where that is coming from. Perhaps the yeast? Just as I was about to pat myself on the back, our fusel alcohol reared its ugly head. Its subtle and masked by just how hoppy this is, but I think an extra week conditioning would have done wonders or just getting the temperature under 20 degrees. Alas.
Mouthfeel
The water treatment was largely success but not quite as soft as the best commercial examples. If you've ever had Unity's Collision or some of the more recent Pressure Drop beers, you'll know that it's a little like drinking a hop-saturated cloud. Definite room for improvement.
Drinkability
The fusel alcohol really throws a spanner in the works here - its almost a really good beer. It's not quite nail polish but it is a bit cheap vodka. As it has been so warm recently, I imagine the fermentation temp is to blame here. As our flat is on the cold side, all my temp control focuses on keeping fermentation warm - I don't have anything to cool it down. Again, when I am rich I will have glycol coming out of every orifice.
General Notes
Lots of ideas for the next version of this - more wheat, more oats, maybe a more ester forward yeast, more conditioning time, better temp control, maybe bring the abv down a touch. Is 7% a DIPA? Maybe this should just be an IPA. Keeping hops in a cylinder so I don't have to cold crash would also help. Not a bad beer, but not going to win any awards yet.
General Notes
Lots of ideas for the next version of this - more wheat, more oats, maybe a more ester forward yeast, more conditioning time, better temp control, maybe bring the abv down a touch. Is 7% a DIPA? Maybe this should just be an IPA. Keeping hops in a cylinder so I don't have to cold crash would also help. Not a bad beer, but not going to win any awards yet.
Wow. That's a long read dude.
ReplyDeleteI never knew "Bottle conditioning IPA has a major downside in that the secondary fermentation will only clean up around 30% of the oxygen in the bottle, letting the remaining 70% wreck havoc with your beer" - I love a good stat.
From some 1970s grandad in his shed.