Gyle 35 - #InsultToHistory Black IPA

The decision to brew a black IPA was made after a bit of amusement on Twitter when a gentleman by the name of Roger Protz (editor of the good beer guide) made the comment of Black IPA - "it's an insult to the intelligence and to a historic beer style". This just made me want to brew one again (it has been over a year), so here's my go at a black IPA.

I decided to go for an eminently sessionable drink, so I've laid the groundwork for a beer with an ABV of 6.5%, and I've set the hopping so that the theoretical IBU came out at a rather decent 65 (though, this is pretty easy to do when most of the hops go in at the end).

[EDIT] As a note, this brew may, or may not have anything to do with the upcoming ABC brewing challenge, keep it under your hat, I don't want anyone else knowing what I'm bringing to the table. It does have to be said that if this *is* the beer for that, then it is being brewed a tad early, but I won't be able to do much brewing in the coming months due to this being the last semester of my Mechanical Engineering degree, and I have an absolute fuckload of work to do before I even get to the exams in May.  Ignore all that, it was just pointed out to me by @Cinykk that I managed to fuck up the order of the hops, that *I* helped set with @PyotrSidwell for the ABC brewing challenge. Eagle eyed people would have noticed from the ABC challenge that the hop order was Columbus, Simcoe, Experimental 366, and finally Cascade. I obviously wasn't paying attention and did the hop addition order as Columbus, Experimental 366, Simcoe, and Cascade. Oh well, it just means I need to think of something else to brew for the ABC challenge. I hope I don't run out of hops. ;-)

A side to the usual blog format, I'm listening to music via Youtube, it's an easy way to get different music depending on my mood. I started a mix with Freda Payne - Band of Gold (I fucking love this song), I'm now enjoying Want Ads by Honey Cone. I just thought you should know.

Anyway, back to the beer.

I aimed for the 6.5% based on a system efficiency of 75%, and using US-05, I'm aiming for an attenuation of about 84%. For the malts, I used;

Marris Otter - 5800g
Weyermann's Carapils - 600g

I also used 600g of Weyermann's Carafa 3, but that wasn't used in the mash, only for the sparging, so I'll deal with that shortly.

[EDIT #2 - Spotted by @Plot2Pot] I also threw in a decent handul of rice hulls oat husks to the mash tun. This adds nothing to the actual mash, but certainly helps by acting as a bit of a filter and helps reduce the chance of a stuck mash (a stuck mash is when the grain bed has compacted, usually by a quick runoff, which stops any liquid from leaving the vessel).

I mashed in 16 litres of liquor with a strike temperature of 73 C to give me a mash temperature of 65 C, and this was left for a tad over an hour to do it's magic.

I then added the Carafa 3 on top of the mash and started to sparge with 23 litres of 75C liquor to give a total liquor bill of 39 litres.

In the past I had tried to rush things, and especially the sparging, and had ended up with either stuck mashes, or diabolical system efficiencies. Now I just set the run off to be really slow, and I also usually recirculate about a quarter of the collected wort.

Because this is a BIPA, I wanted to extract as much of the colour from the Carafa 3 as possible, so I actually recirculated about half of the collected wort. This meant that the sparging took over an hour, but that's a pretty relaxed hour as opposed to a really stressful hour dealing with a stuck mash or any of the other problems that can occur due to quick runoff.

Once the beautiful dark wort was collected (32.5 litres) with a pre-boil gravity of 1.046, this was transferred into the kettle for the boil. This obviously had to wait for the mash tun to be emptied and cleaned, as I am using the same vessel for both duties at the moment. The volume and gravity gave a mash efficiency of 74.8%. I generally find that the bigger the beer, the better the efficiency of the mash tun at the moment, which isn't really a problem. I'm listening to Young Hearts by Candi Staton now, it reminds me of school discos.

The lovely wort got up to the boil fairly rapidly, and 9 grams of Magnum was added as the bittering addition, the full hop breakdown is as follows;

15 minutes - Columbus - 30g @ 18.3% AA (& half a protofloc tablet)
10 minutes - Experimental 366 - 40g @ 15.5% AA (& some yeast nutrient)
05 minutes - Simcoe - 50g @ 11.7% AA
00 minutes - Cascade - 90g @ 7.4% AA

At flameout I put a lid on the kettle and started to connect up the sanitised conterflow wort chiller, and then went off sorting out the hoses and whatnot whilst I left the wort to sit and steep for 20 minutes to extract as much out of the Cascade as possible.

I then started the runoff and collected 25.5 litres of deliciously dark insulting pale wort with a gravity of 1.0587, this is pretty much bang on the mark, and gave me an overall system efficiency of 77%. That's a number I can happily deal with.

I'm thinking dry hop will be done in two batches with the following;

Batch 1
Columbus - 70g
Experimental 366 - 60g

Batch 2
Simcoe - 50g
Cascade - 10g

That will give me 100g of each hop (not including bittering) and an overall usage of 409g, not a crazy amount by my homebrew club's standards, but it's not too shabby.

I pitched in some US-05 as I want a nice clean finish from the yeast so that the hops shine. I do find that US-05 takes a little longer to clean up after itself, but the end results are usually pretty good. One thing to note, as I do a lot of brewing with different yeasts (such as Brettanomyces and Saison) I've been and bought a new FV so that each yeast has it's own dedicated FV. This should mean I don't get any cross contamination from he various yeasts. I'll let you know how this goes.

~Edit 27/03/14~

The beer fermented down to 1.010 and has just come out of the cooling fridge, where most of the yeast dropped out of suspension and cleared the beer, where it was racked off to a secondary fermentor.

I thought I'd dry hop this beer, so I've taken some details and photos so that you can enjoy the process, and maybe comment on how you do it. I had expressed what hops I was going to use for the dry hop, but as this beer ended up not being the ABC brew, that removed the restrictions, so I am saving the Simcoe for that. To that end, I decided to dry hop with 2012 Amarillo pellets, and the oh-so-fresh Cascade whole hop that I got recently.

The Amarillo was easy, I just weighed out what was left in the bag, and that was going in, it ended up being 55g.

The Cascade was a little different as it was whole hop. I "weighed" out the hops (and I use that term in the loosest sense).

In reality, it was probably about 90g as it went everywhere (you can't see that some of it is on the work surface). I then got out the hand held blender to wizz this up to a finer consistency, that's so that there is more surface area of the hop in contact with the beer, and more of the oil free to mix and make the beer a lovely "London Murk".

I used a little of the actual beer as a lubricant and binder for the hops so that they would actually blitz, I got the beer from the hose as I was doing the transfer to the secondary FV. And I did the entire lot, before putting them in a sterilised hop bag (or tights, some would call it). I had kept it in some starsan, but I took it out of there, put it in some bleach, then rinsed and used boiling water to finish. You can't be too careful.

I added the hop pellets to the hop bag before tying up the top, ready for addition to the beer.

Finally, I added the hop bag to the beer and placed it in the store room. It will probably sit there for about 4 days before I then move it back to the chill fridge to see if I can get the hop bag to drop to the bottom with temperature.

Not a crazy amount of hops for dry hopping, by any stretch, only 6 g/l, I'll taste it in a few days and decide whether to add more hops or not.