Indian Pale Ale
I had some colleagues from India visit on a work trip in early September. Of course, when they asked what I would like them to bring from India, I requested spices… for brewing. This presents the perfect opportunity to make an IndiaN pale ale! How could I pass it up? I must admit, I’m not very knowledgeable regarding Indian cuisine so I had my brew club help draft a list of requests based on their culinary experience. Here is everything I received:
Since the hop harvest/brew day timing didn’t quite work out this year, I ended up drying all the hops I picked. In effect, I’m sort of combining my hop harvest pale ale into this Indian-spiced concoction of a brew day this year. However, I am still playing it safe. No spices will be added until secondary fermentation and I think I will buy smaller secondary fermenters to split the batch in half, dry-hopping both but only spicing one. This way I’ll still have some unadulterated homegrown hopped IPA and not too much spiced beer (incase it turns out over-spiced). Haven’t quite decided what spice I will add yet, but I’m leaning towards just the amchoor powder (dried mango). I’m thinking it could add a complimentary citrus/fruity note.
Here’s the base recipe (grain bill from Brewing Classic Styles, hops dictated by my homegrown supply, save for the magnum bittering addition I had lying around
Double Dog Dare IPA
This is the first brew day I attempted solo. Like I’ve said, I love IPA’s so why not try and make a double IPA. I was still doing extract boiling at this point so this recipe consisted of pretty much double the extract syrup of the Snaggletooth IPA recipe along with a shit ton of hops added at various points of the boil. Part of the extract partial boil recipe has you make “hop tea” where you… make a tea with hop pellets. Kinda fun. I love the smell of hops. I started understanding the hydrometer a bit more at this point so I actually took and kept some readings recorded:
OG: 1.086 (recipe had me shooting for 1.083)
FG: 1.021 (the end result seemed a bit sweet and I think this was why)
I recall transferring this to secondary and dry-hopping on June 26th or 27th I believe. The hop pellets moved around quite a bit, which seemed good. I seem to recall having a busy summer and not getting around to bottling this batch until early August, which was maybe a mistake? August 27th was the big day, the first bottles to be cracked at my buddy Jim’s new house for a BBQ. NO CARBONATION! It tasted pretty good but no bubbles at ALL. So pissed. I worked pretty hard on this batch so I was mad.
Snaggletooth IPA
Dad brewed with me again. We used all spring water this time, not distilled as with the first batch. It turned out
GREAT! This batch was given the name Snaggletooth IPA after Leiny’s snaggletooth.
I’m a big fan of India Pale Ale’s, so I thought I’d try my hand at one. IPA’s have such a distinctive hop character they just smack you in the face. This probably plays well into my personality, as I’m an all-or-nothing kind of guy, most of the time. The recipe I used was Northern Brewer’s Chinook IPA extract kit. Partial boil. I believe chinook hops were used for both bittering and aroma in this recipe. (more…)