My first recipe... my own Pain and Perk IPA

[noremorse1]

This is a mini-mash

3 pounds American 2 Row
1 pound Crystal 40
7 pounds Gold LME

1 oz Centennial 60 min
1 oz Centennial 20 min
2 oz Centennial 5 min
1 oz Centennial Dry Hop

Yeast: Safale US-05

Mash at 152f for 60 minutes. Ferment at 62 degrees for 7-10 days. Transfer to secondary, add hops. Rack in 7-10 days to keg or bottling vessel.

OG at 75% Efficiency for 5 gallons is 1.070
IBU's 78.4

[noremorse1]

Just brewed it and hit my gravity reading on the nose. I was pretty stoked. One thing to note, 4 ounces of hops sucks up a lot of wort. I ended up having to add an additional 1/4 of a gallon to get at 5.5 gallons. I use gallon jugs of distilled water and didnt have any left... luckily I am smart enough to always have some extra boiling water on hand on brew day.

Anyhow, as long as the dry yeast I am experimenting with was rehydrated properly and kicks this beer down this should be a killer beer!!

[Bugeater]

Leaf hops do suck up quite a bit of liquid. Normally I scale my recipes for 5.5 gallons so that I get right at 5 gallons into the keg. For IPA's, I scale the recipes to 6 gallons and for IIPA's I go even bigger.

Last week I brewed a Blind Pig clone. I had a lot of old hops to use up (from 2006) so once I ran the hop degradation calculations, I ended up using about 10 ounces of hops. That really soaked up the wort. Just wait until you try a Pliny clone. That uses 18 ounces of hops.

Wayne

[Thirsty Mallard]

Looks tasty. Let us know how it turns out.

[noremorse1]

Leaf hops do suck up quite a bit of liquid. Normally I scale my recipes for 5.5 gallons so that I get right at 5 gallons into the keg. For IPA's, I scale the recipes to 6 gallons and for IIPA's I go even bigger.

Last week I brewed a Blind Pig clone. I had a lot of old hops to use up (from 2006) so once I ran the hop degradation calculations, I ended up using about 10 ounces of hops. That really soaked up the wort. Just wait until you try a Pliny clone. That uses 18 ounces of hops.

Wayne

I used pellet hops but, i use those nylon paint strainer bags as a hop sack. it leaves plenty of room for them to explode and balloon up. they did it so much my immersion chiller was stuck on them.

Its been 12 hours since I pitched and there is no real activity. Although the bobber in my 3 piece airlock does appear to be raised a bit so I think there is some pressure building. At 1.070 I imagine it may take this dry yeast awhile to get started.

[noremorse1]

Just took my first hydrometer reading after 5 days in the primary. It is looking like its between 1.012 and 1.014. Woohoo... I didn't get the 1.020 blues even at 64-66ish.

Tasted pretty green but, that is to be expected. Man was it bitter too. This could be one of my best brews yet and the beauty is, I created the recipe. Well, sorta. I took one I liked and made a bunch of changes to it.

[noremorse1]

Took a gravity reading today and it was sitting at about 1.010-1.011 so I figured it would be a good time to transfer. I am using the 1-2-3 method here. 1 week primary, 2 weeks secondary, and 3 weeks keg conditioning. I called brichards and asked him a question about my idea to add 1/2 gallon of bottled drinking water to put this where it should have been volume wise (forgot to calculate for hop absorption with 4 ounces of pellets in the boil). I thought it might be a good idea to boil a cup of DME in my water before adding to keep the alcohol level the same... he advised against this since I would also be dry-hopping.

It is nice having an award winning brewer as a brother-in-law just a phone call away.

Anyhow, its sitting at about 5 1/4 gallons right now. Looking at my promash file for this recipe, it seems to drop my OG from 1.070 to 1.064 and my IBU's from 81.5 to about 76.

Should be a little more balanced. Time will tell. I will brew this again but, next time, calculate for those thieving hops!