Gyle 33 - Hoppy Belgian Brown IPA

This is totally different than anything I've brewed before, purely because of the way it was hopped, and also that I'm not dry hopping it.

This beer started out as most others do, with an idea born from either my head, a conversation, or the internet. Now, recently I was in a twitter conversation with Connor Murphy (@likethemurphys) and he went ahead and brewed a hoppy brown ale with saison yeast. Well, I'd just built up my stocks of saison yeast, and needed to brew with it, so I thought I'd follow suit.

I also had had another conversation before a homebrew meeting with Nick Wright (@Cinykk) where he'd explained how he's been hopping differently, and I got it into my head that he only did two hop additions, one for bittering, and another at 5 minutes for everything else. It turns out that's not what he said, but that's what I've done anyway.

So, I decided on the following malts

5000g Marris Otter,

250g Carapils

250g Munich

There was also 100g of chocolate malt, but that was only used for the sparge section, to try and extract some colour and not too much flavour.

I initially mashed with about 14 litres of liquor and hot a rather decent mash temperature of 66.7 degrees (or thereabouts).

Following that, I sparged with about 24 litres of 74 degree liquor. As I was trying to extract as much colour as possible, I ran the sparge as normal. With the liquor running into the MT and being diffused by the foil, which has lots of holes through it.

Then I recirculated the entire lot back through the mash, so to achieve this, I put the wort into the HLT, and just treated it as if it was liquor.

The wort run-off was amazingly clear, it's crazy that sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't. For this brew, I got 73.7% mash efficiency. All in, I used about 17g of Gypsum, and 3.4g of Calcium Chloride over the mash and sparge.

Following the extended sparging session, I put the wort into the kettle and got the wort up to boil (I even managed to plug in both of the elements, and turn them on, long story).

Once the wort was actually boiling, I added the bittering addition of 20g of Magnum hop. Such a lovely, clean, and decent bittering hop. So so good.

Following this, I did absolutely bugger all for 50 minutes (apart from clean up some broken glass as a conditioning bottle had gotten too warm and decided to break for freedom). At the 50 minute mark I added the protofloc, then set the timer for another 5 minutes.

At the 5 minute mark, I added quite a nice quantity of hops, I was going to single hop this, but then thought that I could use up some odds and sods in the hop freezer. So, the following was added for the last 5 minutes of the boil.

40g Mosaic

85g Citra

125g Last years Experimental 366 (kindly donated by @GazzaPrescott, and my favourite hop).

This had the effect of filling the kettle very quickly, and lots of lovely aroma filled the kitchen.

Following the last 5 minutes of the boil, I hooked up my counterflow wort chiller and set about chilling the wort down. I'm not going to lie, it's a pretty decent bit of kit that does exactly what I need it to.

Look how clear the wort was when it was running to the chiller.

At the end, I only got a little over 24 litres out of the kettle, instead of the expected 25, this was because the hops blocked for the last litre or so, and I couldn't be arsed to do anything about it. Obviously the trub and everything (other than the hops) goes into the fermentor, that's one of the, I suppose drawbacks, of this method of cooling.

I read someone recently saying that they didn't do this, as it was wasted space in the FV if say, 5 litres of the cloudy shit went into the FV. I don't agree with this at all. 5 litres of trub/wort/whatever go into the FV and at the end of the fermentation about 4.5+ litres of clear beer will come out. The trub/break all settle to the bottom and do no harm whatsoever to my beer, so I'm not going to worry about a bit of break getting into my FV.

I decided that for this brew, I would use a hydrometer as well as the refractometer, purely so I could take a photo of the results. There was a slight discrepancy between the two that I used.

I'm going to take that as 1.052, as that's what my refractometer said as well. This gave an overall brew efficiency of 75%, which I'm pretty happy with. I pitched the saison yeast, and have put in the immersion heater to keep the FV a toasty 22 degrees. If everything goes to plan, this should end up about 5.8% ABV, or thereabouts. So a bit of a summer session beer I feel. 

As I'm using saison yeast, I'm not going to dry hop, rather wanting the yeast to stand out a little when in the bottle, so this will hopefully mean that the beer is brewed and bottled in record time.

Edit - 17/02/2014

So, this got down to 1.008 which gave me a strength of 5.76%, with an attenuation of 84%, which is pretty nice. After fermentation I stuck the FV in the fridge, and because I have been busy, it's stayed there for 6 days.

I've taken it out of the fridge now, and racked off the yeast and proteins/trub to a different plastic vessel so that it can warm up before bottling tomorrow. This is done so that I can do the priming and know how much sugar to add and not get any exploding bottles.

To follow on from the comment I made about everything going into the FV from the kettle, and not losing too much because of the proteins and whatnot, I took a photo of what was left in the FV after I had racked off. It's a pretty negligible amount to be honest, and doesn't cause me any problems with my beer clarity or flavour. Bottling will commence tomorrow.