Brew 8 - Sheepstor IPA (Extract Kit Experiment)

Brew 8 - Sheeptor IPA (Extract Kit Experiment)
                                                                                                            

Brew day: 02/08/2020
Bottle day: 16/08/2020

Another brew, another collaboration. I brewed with my Dad a few weeks ago and the outcome (Gardener's Glove IPA) was superb. My dad has been amazed at the results of all grain brewing and each and every beer surpasses what he has managed with the old extract kits that he used to use. We talked at length about having a little experiment to see if we could get an extract kit to taste half decent. I'd dry hopped a few brew like this in the past and find the results always improved the flavour of the beer. 

After a bit more chat, we hatched a plan to purchase a simple IPA extract base, brewing sugar and then add to it some high quality hops and a decent batch of yeast. We opted for a fairly standard John Bull IPA kit to provide a malt base. 

St Austell's Proper Job is a real go to beer for us both so we looked up a recipe on Brewer's Friend. I found that they use 3 hop varieties added at the end of the boil - Williamette, Chinnock and Cascade. If we added the hops when the malt extract was added to boiling water then there was a good chance we could steep a decent amount of hop oil and alpha acids from the pellets. Not only this, if we left the hops in as a dry hop we might get some interesting flavours. 

Brew day was smooth and swift. No faffing with mashing or boiling - I forgot how simple these kits were. Personally, I enjoy the time spent extracting and boiling up the wort but if this works well then we will have a cheap and quick way of making half decent beer. 

I found that my brewing knowledge (built up over several brews) really helped us to fine tune the wort to what we wanted. We started by mixing the syrupy extract with 2.5 litres of boiling water. At this point we chucked in the hops (to aid the steeping process) and 1Kg of brewing sugar. Then we made up the wort concentrate to 20L with cool water. We got Alice involved. She's really enjoying aspects of the brewing - she likes to help out and has a real love for smelling hops. 

At this point we took a Gravity reading of 1.042 which was low as expected. I've never found kits to give much ABV if you follow the instructions. We wanted a higher OG so we started by adding an additional 100g of sugar, stirring it and then remeasuring gravity. 100g resulted in a gravity increase of around 1.002. 

In total we added 500g of brewing sugar to bring the OG to 1.052. This should give us a final ABV of somewhere between 5.5-6.0%. As a final push to get the quality of the kit up, we added a packet of decent quality brewing yeast - my go to yeast Safale US-05. Alice added the yeast with her Grandad. 

We now sit and wait for the results. Updates to follow.










Bottle day: Smooth as per usual with a decent number of bottles out of the batch. The beer isn't tasting quite ready (to be expected). Updates to follow. 



2 week after bottling: Definite home brew flavour early on, this on needs some real time to mature. That said, it has cleared well. Update to follow. 

Taste update - 28/11/20 - much more drinkable and the homebrew tang is fading. Not a lot of hop and mainly malt. Think this might improve more with further age. 

Ingredients
Malts: John Bull IPA Extract Kit
Hops: Cascade, Chinook, Willamette.
Yeast: Fermentis Safale US-05 Yeast
Batch size Target: 20L 
Batch size into FV: 20L
Batch size Actual: 20L
Number of bottles from batch: 36 bottles (500ml)
Actual OG: 1.052
Target FG: 1.008
Gravity on 15/08/2020: 1.003
Actual FG: 1.003
Target ABV: 5.7%
Actual ABV: 6.4%



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