Brew U

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.

Brew Day

My last few brew days have had to be squeezed in to otherwise unaccommodating timeslots to make them happen at all; this brew day was no exception. If nothing else, I’ve become the king of multitasking. Tired, but determined to brew, I set my alarm to go off early that Saturday morning (which is no small feat considering my one-year-old had spent the night with her grandparents and it was the one morning for months I could try to stave off the eternal exhaustion that comes with small children).

After a 1.25 hour mash, I drained my mash tun, filled it back up with sparge water, and quickly got in the car to go pick up my daughter—extending the amount of time I normally let my sparge water sit in the grains by around 45 minutes. Once I was back and ready to commit to a brew day with no more interruptions, I finished collecting my boil volume and lit the flame under my burner.

And then I ran out of propane. Right as the wort was starting to foam, my propane tank gave up. I use my propane tank with my grill as well, and the last time I had grilled the gauge showed a mostly full tank—the liar. While this was a surprise, it was better than running out of propane in the middle of a boil.

Once I returned with a new propane tank, the rest of the brew day went smoothly—for the most part. Just prior to my wort starting to boil, the foam started to form white, swirling shapes that I’ve never seen happen before (I’m accustomed to my break remaining tan). It was shortly after this that I checked my wort’s pre-boil gravity and realized that this difference was possibly due to a higher than usual protein content since I had definitely overshot my target gravity. Doing some quick math, I diluted my boil but apparently miscalculated. My OG still came in much higher than intended.

Some time after the fact, I consulted the notes from my previous brew day and realized that despite previously being unable to pinpoint the cause of my fluctuating OG, this time was entirely my fault. I simply misremembered a number and ended up not collecting enough pre-boil wort. This mistake combined with the miscalculation above landed me at imperial status for this red IPA. Oops.

Recipe

Iteration 6 was a solid IPA-strength ABV, had the malt character I wanted, and was definitely hoppy enough for an IPA. I was mostly pleased with this iteration, but there were a few things that stuck out to me as items worth changing.

Although Simcoe is a delightful hop, it seemed that its unique character was not working with this particular beer (at least in the way that I had envisioned it originally). The hop character had also been left a little one-dimensional, and I wondered if this had to do with removing my middle-boil hop addition. Lastly, although the malt flavor was spot on and the hop character was IPA-worthy, the balance of the two was off, hiding the malt a little more than desired. This left me with a few questions on how to move forward:

• Should I replace the Simcoe hop addition, and if so, what should I replace it with?
• Should I add a 30 minute hop addition back into my hop schedule, and if so what hop?
• Can I improve the balance of hop and malt character?

Since the Simcoe addition was providing more of a dank/slightly catty quality that wasn’t exactly working with the other flavors in this beer, this meant that this addition had to go. For this beer, I wanted a more citrus-centered hop character than I was getting. The cascade and centennial additions would definitely provide some of that, but they also provided floral notes that, although pleasant in the beer, I wanted more as a backdrop to the citrus. This meant that I needed to add another hop to the mix instead of adding more of what I already had. This decision was fairly simple for me, since one of my favorite hops is Amarillo and it has that citrus character I was looking for.

The decision on whether or not to add a 30 minute addition back in wasn’t that difficult either. After running my hop additions into a recipe calculator, I realized that there wasn’t that much difference in estimated IBU if I used half an ounce of magnum at 60 minutes and half an ounce at 30 minutes as opposed to the full ounce at 60 minutes. I thought this slightly different bitterness level might also allow a little more malt to shine through while still being hop-centric (answering my final question on this recipe). These answers (and overshooting my OG) landed me at this recipe:

• Mashed at 150⁰ F for 1.25 hrs.
  • 10 lbs. 2-Row
  • 1.2 lbs. Crystal 120
  • 1 lb. Vienna
• Boiled for 1 hr.
  • 0.5 oz. Magnum (60 min) at 14.7% AA
  • 0.5 oz. Magnum (30 min) at 14.7% AA
  • 0.5 oz. Cascade (15 min) at 5% AA
  • 0.5 oz. Centennial (5 min) at 9.7% AA
  • 0.5 oz. Amarillo (0 min) at 12.9% AA
• Pitched US-O5
• OG: 1.073
• FG: 1.010
• ABV: 8.3%
• Dry hopped 0.5 oz. Cascade, 0.5 oz. Centennial, and 0.5 oz. Amarillo for 5 days.
• Bottled and primed with 4 oz. of priming sugar.

Tasting

The color of this version was almost perfectly red. The clarity of the beer detracts from that, but it’s definitely red. With the same grain bill as last time, I imagine that the difference came from a variation in the total volume gathered (the desired amount this time), moving this iteration closer to my approximated and target SRM. Unfortunately, this beer poured with a minimal head that dissipated quickly. As previous iterations have had positive head/retention characteristics and I didn’t change anything about my process this time, I want to point to the higher OG/ABV as the reason for this (as this can affect head-forming proteins), but I’m not fully convinced that this variation is enough to make that drastic of a difference.

The aroma of this beer was one of (in order of prominence) plum, citrus, apricot, and black cherry. The apricot is new and not unpleasant—a factor of adding Amarillo to this version, I’m sure.

One surprising element of this brew was how closely the taste matched the aroma. My past experience has led me to expect a slight (or sometimes comparatively significant) difference between these two, even though the sensory perception of taste is greatly impacted by smell. There have been things I’ve smelled but not tasted, and vice versa; more often the prominence of aromas does not match the prominence of similar flavors (e.g., citrus aroma is stronger than the citrus flavor). This iteration, though, tasted almost exactly the same as the aroma led me to think it would taste. I didn’t taste the plum that I had smelled, but the citrus and apricot flavors were there in the same level as they were in the aroma. A cherry flavor (though admittedly not the black cherry I smelled) was also present.

Goals for the Next Brew

While this is a pleasant beer, it is lacking the hop punch that Iteration 6 had. With all the current discussion about hop oils and their impact on aroma and flavor, I looked there to see if I could pinpoint a likely cause of this variation, despite having used the same weight of hops. The information I found listed Simcoe (used in Iteration 6) as having a range of 0.8-3.2 mL/100g of total oil and Amarillo as having a range of 1-2.3 mL/100g of total oil. Since Simcoe has a greater range of potential oil content (both higher and lower), I’ll venture a guess that the Simcoe I used had a higher overall oil content than the Amarillo I used. Unfortunately, I can’t verify that this is true with how and where I bought my hops.

Whatever the cause, the desired hop aroma was definitely missing in this iteration, and that is something I want to fix in the next version of this recipe. I also want to see if I can get more citrus aroma and flavor than I did in this version. I enjoy the apricot flavor of the Amarillo addition and want to keep that, but I did not get as much citrus flavor as I expected from this hop (based on prior experience).

Yet another variation in efficiency has changed my recipe unintentionally (as well as my incorrect calculations that were intended to correct the situation). I am going to shoot for a lower (and more appropriate) ABV for the next iteration.

The questions I’m left with after this brew are:

• Which additional hop should I add to the dry hop to improve aroma (a new hop or one already in use)?
• Which hop should I use to get a more prominent citrus flavor?
• Should I add more hops at flameout in addition to more dry hops? If so, which ones?

Recipe Progression

One item I’ve gotten feedback on is the increasing difficulty in keeping up with all the different versions of this recipe. I can’t help but agree. To help with this and to provide a more visual representation of the progression of this recipe, I’ve put together the chart below.

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.

Brew Day

Another Friday evening brew. I had bought my grains and hops a few days before and began preparing my setup on Thursday night so that all I had to do when I got home the next day was light the propane under my strike water to get going. But as seems to be universal brewing law, nothing can ever go 100% right. As I was gathering my tubing, airlock, etc., I was holding my hydrometer in one hand. (Everyone knows where this story is going.) Not thinking, I let my hand tilt and the hydrometer slid out of the tube, landing on the skinny top-end and doing so firmly on my concrete garage floor. Six years of brewing and I had yet to break a hydrometer. I had begun to believe that I was immune from this seemingly ubiquitous brewer’s problem—but hubris is the downfall of many. I’m sure having a drink or two prior to getting my stuff together certainly didn’t help either.

So, after using my Friday lunch break to make a quick run to the LHBS, I once again had a hydrometer and now had everything that I needed to start brewing when I got home. I was particularly excited for this version of my red IPA for a few reasons. The first reasons was that I had finally achieved a malt profile I wanted to keep with Iteration 5 and it was time to start toying with hops. The second reason was that after several brew days resulting in varying efficiency and lower than anticipated OGs (though maintaining the same process), I believed I had finally determined my problem: the crush provided by the LHBS mill. My solution to this problem was to have them mill my grain twice, hopefully negating any variation in crush in future batches, but also hopefully boosting my efficiency to allow me to achieve 7%+ ABV. As a side note, I did have to rely on my mash efficiency to yield this result as my 5-gallon cooler mash tun was maxed out at 12 lbs. of grain (assuming I wanted a reasonable liquor to grist ratio).

The double milling was a success…ish. It did result in my second ever stuck mash, so I ended up skipping my usual vorlauf step when I sparged since the run-off rate was far less of a problem when I first opened the valve. It did, however, result in particularly high mash efficiency, and that felt worth it. I think I’ll continue asking my LHBS to double mill my grains for now and simply skip the vorlauf, especially since that cloudy wort didn’t result in any cloudier of a beer than I normally get—but that’s another issue for another post.

Recipe

Iteration 5 was perfect in the malt department. It had the dark fruit tones I wanted and had a characteristic red ale taste. The problem was that it wasn’t particularly red, nor was it IPA-level in terms of hoppiness.

For the color issue, I decided to shoot for an estimated 16 SRM, having read previously that this is where the red hue starts to become actually red and having personally experienced this to be true in an earlier iteration. I didn’t really want to change my malt profile, but I did add another 3 ounces of C120 to try to achieve this color. While I was concerned previously about the roastiness more than a pound of C120 added, I had upped the amount of base malt since that iteration and felt comfortable adding a bit more C120 as the percentage of the grist was still less than it was when I had the issue of roast flavor. This left me with a few questions from last time:

• How do I lessen the harshness of the bitterness without lowering the level of bitterness?
• How do I achieve more citrus flavor/aroma and less floral (while still maintaining some of that)?
• How should I adjust my boil/dry hop schedule to achieve more hop aroma/flavor?
• Should I change my hop combination?
• Should I add more hops (in weight)?

To be honest, I didn’t address the first question (regarding harshness) in considering how to adjust my hops for this iteration. The last two questions were simple to answer: yes. However, the trick was determining what that looked like. In order to make a change but to make it small enough that I could determine what the actual effect of that change was, I decided only to add one more ounce of hops into the mix and keep the three varieties of hops that I had previously used. I hoped that this change would also address my desire for more citrus aroma and less of the floral aroma, but I honestly wasn’t sure. The only way to know would be to try it out.

Another variable that hops throw into the mix is trying to balance estimated IBUs (to hopefully achieve the same level of bitterness, although I won’t begin to explore the issue of IBUs here). This is in addition to timing, variety, and amount of each. I thought hard about how best to approach this, and I finally landed on striving for an estimated IBU of within 10 IBUS of the last iteration (since research seems to show that we can’t really tell the difference between two beers 5 IBUs apart, 10 seemed acceptable to me). I also determined that I would keep my late kettle additions the same, although moving Simcoe from 60 and 30 minutes to flameout and dry hop.

Also striving to not change too much in the flavor just yet (outside of intensity), I decided on Magnum for my bittering addition. This allowed for me to skip the 30 minute addition, keep a similar IBU level, and move Simcoe to a place in the hop schedule where I could get more aroma from it. One disclaimer on the Simcoe I bought this time though: it was a different AA% than the Simcoe used in earlier iterations. I’m not sure if this was a different year’s crop or simply a different supplier for my LHBS.

It also seems that I accidently added my Centennial addition at 10 minutes instead of 5 minutes, as in earlier iterations. I did not realize I had done that until I sat down to write this post, but I do know that I did use 10 minutes in my IBU calculations.

• Mashed at 150⁰ F for 1.25 hrs.
  • 10 lbs. 2-Row
  • 1.2 lbs. Crystal 120
  • 1 lb. Vienna
• Boiled for 1 hr.
  • 1 oz. Magnum (60 min) at 14.7% AA
  • 0.5 oz. Cascade (15 min) at 5% AA
  • 0.5 oz. Centennial (10 min) at 9.7% AA
  • 0.5 oz. Simcoe (0 min) at 12.9% AA
• Pitched US-O5
• OG: 1.066
• FG: 1.010
• ABV: 7.35%
• After 7 days, dry hopped 0.5 oz. Cascade, 0.5 oz. Centennial, and 0.5 oz. Simcoe for 5 days.
• Bottled and primed with 4 oz. of priming sugar.

 Tasting

This beer poured with a solid and tall head, and it had excellent staying power. The color was definitively amber. However, the hues of the beer have distinctly red tones when held up to the light. I think if I can get the haze out of my beer, this would shine the red color I’m shooting for. (On a tangential note, I believe I’ve determined the cause of the haze in my beer, and I feel fairly confident it’s due to my brewing water having only 12 ppm of calcium. I have yet to adjust my water, but this low calcium level seems to indicate that I need to strongly consider it, since 50 ppm is the lowest recommended level for any style.)

The aroma of this beer was definitely hoppy, although at the time of writing this, the aroma has faded dramatically since my first bottle a week prior. The nose is one of citrus, a little bit of floral, and that somewhat earthy dank scent so characteristic of Simcoe. The hops are covering up the malt aroma a bit more, but I’m unsure as of yet if it’s a good balance. The malt aroma that does manage to come through is really an indistinct “malt” aroma, lacking the dark fruit scent I was able to get before—or if not lacking, hidden.

The taste was initially typical IPA flavor, with the hops overpowering anything else. As the hops have mellowed over the last week, the plum and cherry flavors I wanted all along are coming through nicely, balanced by a strong, yet smooth citrus and earthy bitterness that lingers on the tongue.

Goals for the Next Brew

While the hop aroma and flavor is much improved in the intensity, I’m not sure that it is improved in the quality. I do love Simcoe as a hop, but I’m not totally sure that it’s the character I want for this beer. I’d like a little more citrus character to balance the plum and cherry flavors I’m getting from the malt, and Simcoe just isn’t doing that for me. The strength of this hop is in its distinct character, and I think, unfortunately, that’s detracting from what this beer could be.

I’m also not perfectly convinced that removing the 30 minute hop addition has improved the complexity of the hop flavor. I’m aware that many beers are now made with bookended hop additions (a bittering and flameout/whirlpool/hopstand addition) or are simply hopbursted, but removing the thirty minute addition from this beer seems to have resulted in a less complex hop flavor.

The questions I’m left with after this brew are:

• Should I replace the Simcoe hop addition, and if so, what should I replace it with?
• Should I add a 30 minute hop addition back into my hop schedule, and if so what hop?
• Can I improve the balance of hop and malt character?

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.

Brew Day

My first brew night. I’m usually a Saturday morning/afternoon brewer, but I decided to take advantage of a Friday evening my wife would be spending with her friends. The night before, I cleared a space in the garage, cleaned all my equipment, prepared a batch of Starsan in my carboy, gathered water and treated it for chlorine, and even measured out my strike water into my HLT so that all I had to do when I got home after work was turn my burner on.

Brewing on a Friday evening makes for a long day of anticipation at work, but everything being ready to go when I got home helped things run smoothly—mostly. The only hiccup I had was my burner turning off while I was inside waiting for my mash water to come up to strike temperature. When I went back outside with the expectation of doughing in, I briefly worried that I had run out of propane. It turned out that the button on this turkey fryer’s “safety timer” (which I had bypassed to avoid my flame going out every 15 minutes if I forgot to reset the timer) simply wasn’t depressed. That was only about a twenty minute setback for the night.

After waiting yet again for my strike water to come up to temp, I doughed in and reached my target temperature. Then, taking advantage to one of the longer wait times on brew day, I made my daughter dinner. After eating, the 1.25 hour mash was just about finished, so I drained my mash tun, ran two batch sparges, and got the little one to bed. With the baby monitor out in the garage with me, the rest of the night went smoothly.

After cooling my wort down with my immersion chiller, I began to clean, giving my wort some time to settle after stirring it during the chilling process. Even then, I still got a fair amount of hop particulates in my carboy, making for some crazy stratification in the time it took me to clean my kettle.

On another note, after taking meticulous notes on the volumes collected from my sparges, the amount collected after boil, and truly calculating my boil-off rate for the first time, I came to a realization. I’ve questioned before why my efficiency has been so seemingly variable. I also thought that I figured out the cause (or at least a contributing factor) after last brew day. Being fully confident of my numbers this time, and all other things being equal, I’m going to point fingers elsewhere and say, “It’s not my fault!” like a child. But seriously, after using more grain than before, taking the gravity of all my runnings, measuring my boil-off rate, and gathering less post-boil wort than I did in Iteration 2 when my OG was 1.064, the only factor that hasn’t been addressed is my crush. Since I don’t own a mill, I rely on my LHBS to crush my grain for me. So, while I feel a little vindicated, I feel simultaneously defeated since I’m currently at the mercy of another to dictate my OG (since it’s been so variable recently, I can’t predict with accuracy how to adjust my grain bill for it). I’m not sure how I’m going to address this just yet. Of course the simple solution is also the expensive solution: buy a mill. We’ll see.

Recipe

Iteration 4 left me with a similar problem to Iteration 3 of this red IPA: the malt I had chosen to bolster the dark fruit flavors I was getting from the C120 had instead overpowered those flavors and left me with what I would classify as a different style of beer altogether. Iteration 4 specifically had an intense breadiness from the Munich malt that was more than what I wanted in this brew and also overshadowed the hops; however, there was a richness and depth to the malt character that I wanted to keep. I also noted that the increase in C120 in this recipe produced roasted flavors that I had not perceived before. These were all things I wanted to change.

This left me with three questions from the last brew:

• How do I tone down the breadiness while maintaining the current malt complexity?
• How can I make the malt character richer without it clashing with the hops?
• How do I eliminate the roasted character of too much C120 while getting more dark fruit flavor than I got before?

I questioned at first whether I should cut down the amount of Munich used or if I should try a new malt altogether. This time, though, the answer to that question seemed simple for a few reasons. Of course, Munich is generally touted as a “more intense Vienna” or vice versa. This alone made the switch to Vienna an obvious choice. Why cut something that may still be too strong (or might not be the backbone this beer needed) in a lesser amount when I could use a different malt that is purported to have a similar but less intense character? The other reason this was a simple choice was that in all my other considerations for additional malts to use for this beer, Vienna was the only one that I hadn’t yet tried. It was my hope that this change would be my answer to the first two questions above.

The question of eliminating the roast character of the C120 also seemed simple, but getting more of the dark fruit flavor at the same time seemed less so. I could easily lower the amount of C120 to an amount I had used before, because the percentage of C120 in Iteration 4 was a little over 11%. In retrospect, I should have expected some sort of negative impact with that much dark crystal. In the end, I simply lowered the amount of C120 used and hoped that the less intense flavors of Vienna would allow the plum and cherry flavors to shine through.

One more change that I made this time was to up my grain bill as a whole in an attempt to bring the ABV of this beer up to a respectable IPA strength. Now that I know where the issue of my continually lowering OG is truly coming from, hopefully next time I can return this beer to a 7% ABV like I achieved in Iteration 2.

• Mashed at 150⁰ F for 1.25 hrs.
  • 10 lbs. 2-Row
  • 1 lb. Crystal 120
  • 1 lb. Vienna
• Boiled for 1 hr.
  • 0.5 oz. Simcoe (60 min) at 12.2% AA
  • 0.5 oz. Simcoe (30 min) at 12.2% AA
  • 0.5 oz. Cascade (15 min) at 5.0% AA
  • 0.5 oz. Centennial (5 min) at 9.7% AA
• Pitched US-O5
• OG: 1.056
• FG: 1.008
• ABV: 6.3%
• Dry hopped 0.5 oz. Cascade and 0.5 oz. Centennial for 4 days.
• Bottled and primed with 4 oz. of priming sugar.

Tasting

I knew going into this brew that my color was going to be a bit lighter than I wanted it to be. At an estimated 14 SRM, I knew the color would be closer to Iteration 1 than the actual red color I achieved with some of the more recent versions. This didn’t really bother me since I wanted to see how these flavors would play together first before adjusting the color (which is much less important to me).

The aroma of this beer had more hop character to it than I’ve achieved before. I’m hoping that this is the result of some adjustments I’ve made after discovering that I had an issue with oxidation, and I would venture to say that it likely is since I haven’t changed anything about my hops yet in this process. The citrus and floral hop aroma came through nicely. There was also a nice mix of malt character in the nose, with notes of toast and plum.

The flavor of this beer immediately hit me with plum, and citrus. There was a good depth of malt richness without being too rich for the style and without overpowering the other flavors. This time, the richness served as a backbone to everything else, which was the hope all along. The finish was one of cherry and citrus, which was absolutely delicious.

Goals for the Next Brew

I think I’ve got my malt bill. I might add an ounce or two more of C120 just to adjust the color, but the malt character this combination yielded was what I’ve been after. It’s a simple malt bill, but it works well.

The focus from this point will be on hops. Somehow the variables here seem more daunting to me than the malt, though. Balancing type and amount of malt is one thing, but I think it’s the added element of boil time and the subsequent bitterness/aroma balance that makes this next part seem like it’s going to take more trial and error than getting the malt bill right.

The bitterness of this Iteration was a little harsher than I’d like, but it had a good level of bitterness. Overall, I’d also like to see more aroma and flavor. The citrus and floral character that this current combination of hops, amounts, and boil/dry hop schedule gives me has been nice, but I’d like to see a little more citrus and a little less floral notes.

The questions I’m left with as I go forward are these:

• How do I lessen the harshness of the bitterness without lowering the level of bitterness?
• How do I achieve more citrus flavor/aroma and less floral (while still maintaining some of that)?
• How should I adjust my boil/dry hop schedule to achieve more hop aroma/flavor?
• Should I change my hop combination?
• Should I add more hops (in weight)?