Design Notes:
The last time we brewed the Rainy Day IPA was our first attempt at a real "throw a lot of hops in at different times" IPA. Because we start almost all of our beers with 6 lbs of pale liquid extract and we really don't want to go with more than 3 lbs of grain in our partial mashes, our first IPA also ended up on the low side in the ABV rankings (about 5.2 %).
This version of Rainy Day we wanted to simplify the hop structure (to see how much of a difference it makes) and increase the starting gravity a bit by adding some dry malt extract (DME) to get us up into the mid-range of IPAs (6.5ish % ABV).
As before, we're going to dry hop with 1 oz of Amarillo in the secondary. We may also add the Centennial that we've got left over, we'll see. The hop nose on the first brew came out pretty well, but we can always go with more.
Overall, this brewday was one of the least stressful, and therefor most successful, brewdays yet.
Beer nerd stats below the fold...
Final beer volume (wort in the fermenter): 20 litres (5.28 gal)*
* for those who are new to this blog, our primary fermenter came from Australia (as part of a Coopers starter kit), so it's got metric markings on it. We find that we lose about a quarter of a gallon to trub/yeast/hops in the bottom of the primary, so filling to 20 liters lets us almost completely top off our 5 gallon secondary carboy.
Measured O.G.: 1.063
Target final S.G.: 1.014 (6.42% ABV)
Malt bill:
57.14% Pale Liquid Extact (6 lbs)**
14.29% Great Western 2-row (1.5 lbs)
9.52% Light DME (1 lbs)
9.52% Victory (1 lbs)
4.76% Crystal 60 (0.5 lbs)
2.38% Crystal 120 (0.25 lbs)
2.38% Special B (0.25 lbs)
We used 6 lbs of Alexander's Pale Extract. This is pretty much all we can get from the local homebrew store that doesn't have anything else in it (e.g. not an Amber Extract, which usually has Munich or Vienna malt extract mixed in). However, as of the Black Butte brew day we've started using this as a "middle" addition after the bittering hops have had about half an hour to boil into the wort. Whether this is worth doing, we don't know. We'll see how it turns out. If we don't see any real difference, then we'll probably go back to adding this at the start of the boil, since it takes about 10 minutes to get back to a boil after you add the LME in the middle.
Hops:
1 oz 9.2% AAU Centennial (60 minutes***)
1 oz 7.9% Cascade (30 minutes)
1 oz 8.5% Amarillo (5 minutes)
***since we did a middle-addition of LME, the Centennial was actually in there for something more like 80 minutes, but there was about 20 minutes where the wort wasn't at boiling. The Cascade was added after the LME addition, so it's 30 minutes is really the time from when it was pitched until flameout.
Other stuff:
1/4 tsp Irish Moss (15 minutes)
Yeast:
2 vials of WLP001 California Ale Yeast
Dry Hops****:
1 oz 8.5% Amarillo
1 oz 9.2% Centennial (maybe?)
****We add the dry hops when we transfer to the secondary after a week of primary fermentation. We try to keep a one-week brew cycle, so the beer stays on the hops for about a week until we transfer out of the secondary for bottling.
Partial Mash Profile:
We do our partial mash in our boil kettle with about 8 liters of water, regardless of the amount of grain that we're steeping/mashing. We've generally found that having more water than is strictly necessary doesn't harm anything, and keeping the process the same from batch to batch lets us control the temperature of the mash better since we're heating the same amount of water each time.
For the paler beers we tend to shoot for about the mid-150s for our partial mash. This doesn't really matter all that much for us, since most of our gravity comes from the LME/DME. However, we do end up getting an efficiency of roughly 80% from whatever grains we've got in our partial mash.
This beer actually went through an extended mash, since we were bottling the Black Butte clone while this was mashing. So it probably had about an hour of mashing that started off around 155, got as high as 160 in the first half hour, and then we turned the heat off and let it sit for another half hour. By the time we got back to "sparge" the temp had dropped to about 145.
Our "sparging" technique we'll post a link to when we find it again. Basically, we keep a second "strike" kettle with about half a gallon of water in it at 170 degrees. When the partial mash is done, we pull the grain bag out of the kettle and dunk it in the sparge water. We keep dunking it until the sparge water gets nearly as dark as the worst or whoever is sparging gets bored (usually somewhere around 15 minutes). At this point we remove the grain bag, letting as much wort as we can drain out of the grain bag without squeezing it to prevent any grain husks from going through the boil. All this time we've also got the flame going on the brew kettle to get it to about 170 degrees (effectively a mash out). Once we're done sparging in the secondary kettle and the brew kettle is at 170 degrees we dump the strike water (now "batch sparged" wort) into the boil kettle and turn the flame on full to bring it to a boil. We then proceed with the boil.
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