The Double IPA, Hmmm
Posted on: May 5, 2013
- In: Brewing
- 9 Comments
I’m a little confused over the matter of brewing Big IPA’s, in regard to getting bitterness and some dryness into these high strength Imperial or Double IPA.
Consider my AG#92 Klaatu Verata Nictu its an all malt DIPA but the residual sweetness after fermentation is far too high, time in bottle is s-l-o-w-l-y drying it out and its a nice beer, but much more of an American Barleywine than displaying the bitterness characteristics I was aiming for… It would seem that my predicted 200 IBU could have been doubled to 400 IBU to help cut through the sweetness.
This is theoretically where a Sugar addition comes into play to help dry the beer out…
Now consider this AG#85 HopZilla IPA which did have a sugar addition for the purpose of drying the beer out, yet I still got an annoyingly high level of residual sweetness after fermentation, this did eventually dry up and display its proper character in bottle but it took blooming ages! I think I have 1 bottle of this left which I assume will be the dogs bollocks by the time I crack into it.
There is nothing wrong with either of the above beers apart from me not getting what I was aiming for, for my next experiment I will be trying a 10% addition of Dextrose, and a long cool Mash with less malts that could be adding Dextrins to the wort.
The following questions arise:
- Mash Temp?
- Liquor to Malt Ratio?
- Mash Duration?
- Amount & Type of Copper Sugars?
- Malt selection?
- Liquor Treatment additions?
I feel a MASSIVE dry hop is needed on these higher gravity beers, done in two stages.. i.e. Once in the FV, then transfer to Conditioning/Secondary for a while before doing a Second or even Third Heavy dry hop.
We brewed Kala BIPA, 6.2% @SaltaireBrewery a short time ago, I know the ABV is considerably different but we used a sugar addition of almost 10% to great effect in this beer making an amazingly easy drinking beer that went down like a 4% session ale.
Its all fun 🙂 I’d be really interested in how other homebrewers / brewers get their level of bitterness & Dryness in their DIPAs.
Cheers
9 Responses to "The Double IPA, Hmmm"
May 5, 2013 at 1:34 pm
hiya,
both beers had the sweetness at their FG in the fermenter too, so its a fair point you make but in this case I think its not the primings.
May 6, 2013 at 8:05 am
I overnight mash and I have very dry beers so definitely think a long low temp mash will help.
May 6, 2013 at 8:23 am
That sounds worth a try, I’ve only overnight mashed a couple of big beers, one was my Imperial Stout which is all too drinkable 🙂
5 | Stuart J Ross (@MagicRockStu)
May 6, 2013 at 6:41 pm
mash at 63°C for 75 mins
pale malt 95%
Vienna 5%
one bitterness addition 90-110 IBU
add enough Dextrose to get 1.080, add at the end of boil.
ferment at 19°C
Should ferment to below 1.010
cool to 10C
Rack of the yeast.
Add dry hop,
4 days later add more dry hop
package
drink fresh!!!
May 17, 2013 at 12:24 am
Has anyone ever tried adding “dry beer enzyme” or is this considered cheating? I saw some in the home-brew shop, whilst looking for yeast nutrient and the packet suggested that it could be used to dry beer and restart a stuck fermentation. Presumably this works like the enzymes in the malt and breaks down non-fermentable sugars into yeast bite sized pieces? Probably not something you’d want to rely on (Stu’s method looks good, and I am also game for an overnight mash!) but I wondered if it might be useful to rescue a “sweet batch”. If you have to leave it too long to condition out I assume you’ll loose a lot of the hops!
November 9, 2013 at 5:09 pm
[…] iFuggle – I’ve been threatening doing this for a while, a big-ass Fuggle IPA, its an experiment and I may not like it but thats no reason not to try! The Dextrose will go in with the Protafloc in the last 10 minutes so as not to effect the hop utilisation, I’m using a couple of @MagicRockStu’s tips too. […]
Probably Due To Network Congestion 
May 5, 2013 at 12:47 pm
Looking at your recipe and notes from the brew day it all looks fine and I don’t see a reason that you would have residual sweetness base on that. However, my guess would be that you’re tasting the sweetness from the priming sugar for bottle conditioning. That’s my only guess.
Up to that point everything seems fine: mash temps, grain bill, yeast strain, pitching rate, fermentation conditions, FG. The fact that you’re tasting the sweetness after bottling and that it dissipates during the conditioning would tell me that it’s just a slow conditioning process probably because of the high abv. This may be one of those cases of just giving it time.
Don’t know if that’s helpful at all…