Red IPA: Iteration 11

This post is one in a series of making small adjustments to a single recipe in order to improve it, learn more about the impact each ingredient has on the finished product, and the art of recipe creation. The rest of the series can be found here.

Author: C. McKenzie

Brew Day

After brewing nothing but Red IPA for a year, I needed a break. Honestly, though, I didn’t end up taking as long of a break as expected (only ten months). I’ve been brewing mainly maltier beers since last year, and I started to get the urge to brew something big and hoppy. It seemed like a good excuse to dust off the Red IPA recipe, tweak it a little, and see if it stood up to my previous impressions of it now that my palate has had a decent break from it. I honestly have to admit that I’d begun to wonder if my favorable impressions of the beer became more favorable over the ten iterations since I had only brewed that style last year, and it therefore made up most of the beer I drank.

Brew day started early on a Monday work-holiday. I’ve gotten in the habit of staging my setup and gathering my water the night before, so I lit the flame under my strike water for my mash before I’d even properly woken up. I put a kettle on the stove, used the hot water to preheat my mash tun, made some coffee, and stepped back outside to check the temperature of the water. I’d let it sit on the flame for a little too long, and I was about 4⁰F over the strike temperature calculated to hit my desired mash temperature. I pulled it off the burner and let it sit for a few minutes to cool down before mashing in. After waiting, I still overshot my mash temperature by 1⁰F, but I’d actually overshot my temperature the last time I brewed this beer too, so that was actually in line with the mash temperature for Iteration 10. No worries. At this point, I went back inside for a leisurely breakfast while the mash was doing its thing.

After the saccharification rest, I gathered my first runnings and completed two batch sparges. I used the full 9 gallons of water I’d collected beforehand, but was mistaken in doing so. My target pre-boil volume was 7 gallons, and I overshot that volume—only the 7 gallons I planned for made it into my kettle due to both kettle-size limitations and hop utilization considerations. After an uneventful boil and hop stand, I saw that my sparging error ended up landing me 2 points below my target gravity. Not terrible, but not ideal—oh well.

I chilled my wort down to a balmy 90⁰F (only about 3-5⁰F over my groundwater temperature during the summer months) and transferred it into my carboy. I wanted to give my fermentation chamber a helping hand to get to wort down to pitching temperature since it struggles a bit in the summer in my garage, so I put my carboy in a water/ice bath and alternated between letting it sit in the cold water and rocking it back and forth to aid in the heat transfer. Once I felt the temperature had dropped enough, I put it in my fermentation chamber, let it chill some more, and pitched my yeast. When I checked the next morning, there was already a nice krausen forming.

After fermentation had completed, I added my dry hop charge and let it sit for three day before cold crashing. I then transferred the beer to my keg and put it under pressure for a few days before pulling my first pint.

Recipe

Iteration 10 was a vast improvement over Iteration 1. A year of small changes to this recipe certainly helped, but it didn’t land me where exactly I wanted in terms of how this beer tasted in its last version. The hop aroma in Iteration 10 was exceptional. I believe that the combination of increased late kettle hops and a decently hefty dry hop charge played a big role in achieving that character, as compared to the lesser-than-IPA aroma of Iteration 9. Iteration 10 was also the first iteration that truly drank like an IPA in terms of hop flavor, but that unfortunately hid the malt flavor of dark fruits I’d spent so much time trying to achieve. It was also a little heavy-handed in its bitterness—which is what I believe was pinpointed as “astringency” by the judges at the competition I submitted it to.

In response to all of this, I wanted to change the excessive bitterness and help the malt shine through again, though still achieve a high level of hop aroma and flavor. The hops seemed to be where I needed to focus. Knowing that I had jumped from 0.5 ounce additions to 2 ounce additions with the late kettle hops, I began to realize that I had never taken the time to consider the IBU impact of those additions—only the flavor/aroma impact. In concept, I initially wanted this beer to be somewhere around a 1:1 BU:GU ratio (a ratio of bitterness units and gravity units—a concept outlined in Ray Daniels’ Designing Great Beers). I had this ratio in mind, but I never really calculated it to see where I was in order to use it as a reference point for my adjustments to my hop additions. I decided to change that. Iterations 8 and 9 both had an OG of 1.066 and calculated IBUs of 51, yielding a BU:GU ratio of 0.77. Iteration 10, on the other hand had an OG of 1.064 and calculated IBUs of 71, giving me a BU:GU ratio of 1.1.

From both an IBU numerical standpoint and the BU:GU ratio standpoint, that’s quite a difference. I decided I needed to tread somewhere in the middle and shoot for a ratio of around 0.9-1. Toying around with some changes, I ended up at 57 calculated IBUS and a ratio of 0.89, which was good enough for me (I understand 6 IBUs isn’t that much, but neither would be the 4 additional IBUs needed to get me to that midpoint of 61 IBUs—plus, I am currently buying hops in single ounce bags and not in bulk, so from a practical standpoint, avoiding the use of partial ounces of hops made sense.)

One additional change I made was the return to using Amarillo. I used Citra in Iteration 10, and while I enjoyed it for this beer, it wasn’t quite the same. I got a solid citrus character, but I was missing the distinct apricot flavor I was getting from the Amarillo hops. Plus, I had made the change in Iteration 10 out of necessity when my LHBS only had Amarillo that was potentially mishandled somewhere along the supply chain based on my experience using it in Iteration 9. Certain that the Amarillo I picked up this time was different that the last time (based on it being in a different hop supplier’s packaging), I decided to give it a go. All of these changes led to the following recipe:

• Mashed at 151⁰ F for 1 hr.
  • 10 lbs. 2-Row (82%)
  • 1.2 lbs. Crystal 120 (10%)
  • 1 lb. Vienna (8%)
• Boiled for 1 hr.
  • 0.5 oz. Magnum (60 min) at 14.7% AA (26 IBUs)
  • 0.5 oz. Magnum (30 min) at 14.7% AA (20 IBUs)
  • 1 oz. Cascade (10 min) at 5% AA (6 IBUs)
  • 1 oz. Centennial (5 min) at 9.3% AA (6 IBUs)
  • 2 oz. Amarillo (hop stand at <180⁰ F) at 8.2% AA (0 IBUs)
• Pitched US-O5
• OG: 1.062
• FG: 1.009
• ABV: 6.96%
• Dry hopped 2 oz. Cascade, 1 oz. Centennial, and 1 oz. Amarillo for 3 days.
• Kegged

Tasting

This iteration poured with an excellent, thick head that had excellent retention. The color was less red than it was an orange-ish amber.

The aroma was pleasant, but less present than desired. There was a prominent citrus smell that reminded me most of orange rind. Other hops aromas included pear, apricot, and peach. The portion of the aroma that came from the malt smelled of Bing cherry and plum; these malty aromas were not present at first but came out more as the beer warmed.

The level of bitterness in this beer was not quite balanced and hid the malt character some. The bitterness lingered on my palate and was a bit sharp in the aftertaste. Specific hop flavors I noticed were grapefruit, orange, and apricot. There was a rich maltiness that served as a backbone to the beer but that did not taste heavy or thick. That said, most of the distinctive malt characteristics that presented themselves so nicely in the nose did not show up in the flavor. As the beer warmed, I did perceive some Bing cherry in the taste, but it was less present than I would hope it to be.

Final Thoughts

Although I didn’t have a bottle of Iteration 10 to compare this version to anymore (as it had been almost a year since I last brewed this beer), I couldn’t do a one to one comparison, but I could compare it to my notes from before. I do believe that this iteration is an improvement over Iteration 10. The bitterness level was down and not as overpowering as in Iteration 10, and I managed to get the apricot flavors back that I enjoyed over the hit-you-over-the-head orange flavors of Citra.

All that said, I do believe this I believe the level of bitterness is still an issue. I think it’s the bitterness and not the hop flavor that is hiding the malt flavors. I think my main points of dissatisfaction with this beer come from the aroma not being as prominent as expected and from the imbalance of bitterness and maltiness.

I could guess on the reason for lack of hop aroma and assume the usual culprit of oxygen, but I’ve gotten more prominent aroma than this when I’ve bottled previous iterations. This is the first time I’ve kegged this beer, so by all means my oxygen uptake should be less; however, I won’t rule it out since I’m not doing closed transfers and might have gotten some more splashing than I thought I did when transferring my beer to the keg.

Another consideration about the lack of aroma is the hops themselves. I frequent my LHBS for all my ingredients, and though they store all of their hops cold in the front of the shop, they are repackaged into one ounce packs from the original package by the owner. One thing I’ve noticed about the hops from this shop is that the alpha acid percentages on the labels of these repackaged hops have been the same since I started buying from there. This either means that the owner hasn’t bothered to change the AA% on the labels when a new package of hops is being used (potentially throwing off my bitterness calculations), or they could possibly be using the same package for several years—I do believe this particular shop moves more wine-making product than brewing ingredients, so it’s a real possibility. If the latter is true, then there’s no telling how old these hops are and, although they smelled fine when I brewed with them, it’s possible that they’ve lost a little “something” during the time they’ve sat unsold. All of this is speculation though because I cannot prove anything one way or another, but it is certainly a potential culprit—something I might question the owner about or perhaps I’ll try buying hops elsewhere to see if it makes a difference.

In terms of the imbalance of bitterness, I also have to consider what role the yeast might be playing—not that I’m accusing US-05 of making this beer overly bitter, but rather I wonder if another strain might not favor, accent, or otherwise complement the hop profile I’ve been using. I also suspect that my “0 IBU” hop stand addition, although it was conducted mainly below isomerization temperatures, might be partially to blame. Perhaps some isomerization did occur during that time, and if so this would account for the extra bitterness that I would not otherwise expect.

Recipe Progression