Brew 9 - Evil Pea IPA

Brew 9 - Evil Pea IPA (Chocolate HopNob Revisited)


Brew day: 25/08/2020
Bottle day: 08/09/2020

I'm going to revisit Brew 3 - a Black IPA. The brew was a bit of a disaster from start to finish - the beer wasn't black and it ended up very, very cloudy and full of trub. The ABV was very low and my mash efficiency was lower back in April. The hop flavour was actually pretty good so I think with some tweaks, I can make this much better. 

Firstly, the malt bill. I need more dark malt to bring out the black colour. I'm going to double the amount of Carafa I and increase the content of Carmalt and Light Crystal slightly, as well as slightly more of the base Pale Malt. This looks to give me a target ABV of 5.5%. 

I'm also upping the hop bill - going with the amount from the Brewdog recipe - 256g of hop pellets on order - most of which is dry hop. This is going to be a hop bomb!

I saved brew day for a rainy day in August - saves wasting a sunny day indoors. I'm using 2 new additions to the method today. Firstly, I'm going to use a Campden Tablet to dechlorinate the tap water to see if this aids the final beer quality. Secondly, I'm going to mash and boil in the same stock pot - I found using the pot on the hob gave me better temperature control through out the mash. 

My main issue to start is that I can't fit all the strike water into the pot so will need to add it as I remove the grain bag - this has clearly impacted upon the OG and I am a little under target in the end. Not the end of the world - I know this method will work better for smaller batches but back to the 2 batch mash in the cool box next time. 

Squeezing out the bag was a real pain with so much in the bag, it was hard to get a good grip. I needed to put grist into separate bags to squeeze out and maximise sugar yield but we got there in the end. This method was definitely time consuming. 

Took a while to hit rolling boil - which wasn't a great rolling boil to say the least. Some element of hot break that I skimmed off the top to reduce clouding later on. Hops went in and I remembered the Irish Moss this time! 

I decided to cool the entire kettle in an ice bath in the sink before syphoning off the wort into the FV using a hop filter and sock (double filtering!) - I'm hoping this reduced the sediment in the final brew. 

Original Gravity came out quite low (blaming the poor mashing technique) so I decided to give the yeast a little push with some Demerara Sugar - 250g in total nudging the OG to 1.045 which should give me a nice sessionable ale. Now to wait 4 days to dry hop. 

I dry hopped at 4 days - adding the hops in separate hop bags along with a stainless steel spoon to weigh down. I think I need to find something a little heavier as my dry hops are still floating on the surface and I must be losing some hop aroma that way. 

That said, the smell is immense when I come to bottle. Very similar to Brew 3 but this time the beer is much darker and much less cloudy (syphoning/filtering from the kettle was definately a good idea!). I squeeze 24 bottles out of this run using the pressure barrel to fill the bottles again. I found this bottling run quite time consuming but I took my time as to not make mistakes. 60g of priming sugar into 400ml of water was used to mix the beer and primer. 

Now to wait for a taste... 












Taste update (17/10/20): Just over a month since bottling and most of the bottles have been supped (10 left) and this one is a real success! I've share a good number with friends and family and had a lot of positive feedback all round. The malty roast is very strong but is quickly replaced with a strong hop flavour - not citrusy more dark fruit (perhaps plum) and a little piney. I really enjoyed remaking this and and on the whole the beer is much closer to what I wanted. I'd like to tone down the hops and up the coffee/roast flavour profile a bit next time or perhaps try some different hops (I reckon Bramling Cross would work with this beer). Overall beer rating: 4.5/5.

Ingredients
Malts: Pale Malt, Carafa I, Caramalt, Light Crystal. 
Adjuncts: Demerara Sugar
Hops: Simcoe, Citra, Amarillo
Yeast: Fermentis Safale US-05 Yeast
Batch size Target: 15L
Batch size into FV: 13L
Batch size Actual: 12L
Number of bottles from batch: 24 x 500ml Bottles (12L)
Target OG: 1.056
Actual OG: 1.045
Target FG: 1.014
Actual FG: 1.008
Target ABV: 5.5%
Actual ABV: 4.8%
Brew Efficiency: 44%



Notes from Brewday:




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