Gyle 20 - AG First Love Fruit Salad IPA

The premise for this started with a twitter discussion with @ColinStronge (Buxton Breweries Chief Copper Monkey) where he rather poetically said that he loved Simcoe like it was his first love. So I decided to do a brew with Simcoe in honour of first loves.

I devised the recipe up whilst brewing the last beer, (Gyle 19 - Red Chinook Saison) and came up with the following;

5000g Marris Otter (92.59%)
200g CaraPils (3.7%)
200g Munich (light) (3.7%)

I wanted just a light base, with enough cara to give a bit of body and head, but nothing too heavy. I aimed for a 25 litre batch with an OG of 1.046 at 70% system efficiency. This should give me a 5% beer if the yeast attenuates at the expected 87%.

With that malt bill, and mashing in at the usual 2.5 litres per kilogram, that meant that I mashed in with 13.5 litres, which left 21.7 litres held back for the sparge.

I mashed in at 74 degrees, to give me a mash of about 63-64 degrees after malt cooling. This was attained and held for 90 minutes.

Following this, the sparge was performed at 80 degrees over about 40 minutes, with quite a bit being recirculated to try and get as much out of the grain as possible.

The idea of recirculating and sparging also helps to clarify the wort by letting it run through the grain bed, which acts like a filter of sorts. This means that you recirc the wort at the start so that all the particulates are sitting on top of the mash. This gave me a lovely clear wort to start the boil with.

Once in the boil vessel (big old stock pot at the moment), it was time to turn the heat up, and measure out the hops.

Number	Name	Amount (g)	Alpha Acid	Time (Min)	IBU
1	Galena	12	12.0%	60	13.9
2	Simcoe	10	15.0%	20	8.8
3	Amarillo	15	10.9%	15	7.8
4	Exp 366	25	15.70%	10	13.7
5	Simcoe	20	15.0%	5	5.7
6	Amarillo	20	10.9%	5	4.2
7	Exp 366	20	15.70%	5	6.0
8	Simcoe	25	15.0%	0	0.0
9	Amarillo	25	10.9%	0	0.0
10	Exp 366	25	15.70%	0	0.0
11	Simcoe	45	15.0%	Dry Hop	0.0
12	Amarillo	40	10.9%	Dry Hop	0.0
13	Exp 366	45	15.70%	Dry Hop	0.0
14					0.0
	Total Hops:	327		Total IBU:	60.1

I went for Galena as the bittering addition, as it's a lovely clean and clear bittering hop, fantastic to bitter with.

Following that, I used Simcoe, Amarillo, and of course, my favourite and yours, the Experimental 366 hop.

Initially I was adding them separately, but for the 5 minute, and flameout additions, I added them all together.

Then, once the primary fermentation with US-05 had finished, I dry hopped the beer with the above mixture of all three hops.

The beer is, as we speak, undergoing crash cooling in a fridge in the cellar to drop the yeast and hops, and clarify it before bottling. I will add more to this post at the time of bottling.

Mmmmmm, fruity beers.