Probably Due To Network Congestion

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