Saturday, April 12, 2014

Dry Hopped DIPA Side-by-Side Tasting

They kind of look like the same beer because they are the same beer
My girlfriend and I are about to make homemade Bavarian pretzels with lye for the first time tonight. Of course, before we do that, I wanted to compare the Dutch double IPA dry hopped with Columbus, Centennial, Nugget vs. Mosaic, Centennial, Nugget. I want to see how switching up one hop in this tried and true hop combination would change the beer. On one level, a test with these particular hops, but on another level, a topical observation on the nature of how dry hopping changes beer flavor and aroma generally. I find that dry hopping changes a beer much more than simply changing the aroma, as one might read or hear in general knowledge. I think it completely changes the flavor of the beer. The comparison of these two confirmed that assumption.

Tasted both at 48 degrees. Compared them both, rather than one at a time.

Mosaic-Centennial-Nugget

Aroma - oranges, hint of strawberry, tropical fruit.

Flavor - the Mosaic dominates completely: tangerine, tropical fruit.

Columbus-Centennial-Nugget

Aroma - floral, grapefruit.

Flavor - interestingly, the Columbus allows Centennial to come out much more and I taste a distinctive Centennial grapefruit character. No dankness.

A couple takeaways:

  • Columbus, at least this batch, doesn't lend the dank character that I am seeking or at least not enough. To me, it seems to add more citrus, floral character. As has been said before, it appears to be a great "blending" yeast. It's not overpowering and allows other hop character to come through. I'd like to have one more sample without Nugget to see what character it is lending.
  • Mosaic is overpowering. It lends a fantastic tangerine character, but if you want it to blend with other hop flavors, maybe do less Mosaic.

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Dutch DIPA (Mosaic version) tasting

This beer has not been pushing too many pencils
Yum. The first pulls of the first of the Action Hero IPA series, Dutch, still had some resinous bits floating around in it and were just a little too harsh on the bitterness. After one full week of settling, everything has finally dropped out and it's pouring sparkling clear. Today I'm sampling the Mosaic hopped version. If you remember, I split the original batch and did one with equal parts Mosaic, Centennial, and Nugget and the other with Columbus, Centennial, and Nugget. The Columbus, Centennial, Nugget version was a repeat of a 10% abv DIPA I brewed a few months ago. The idea was that I would see if I could make a West Coast IPA comparable (but different) in flavor to an Enjoy By IPA or Hop Juju without heavy hitters like Simcoe, Amarillo, Citra, Nelson Sauvin, Riwuakua or whatever, or other truly pungent new hop varietals.

I wish I would have followed that beer a little more closely on this brew blog. The results were encouraging. With hop bursting and aggressive dry hopping, I was able to make Columbus, Centennial, and Nugget really shine together. I intended to replicate that DIPA exactly and dry hop one with Mosaic as the spotlight and another the same way I had to taste them side-by-side. Due to a brew day snafu, I didn't have the Columbus hops I wanted on hand and, substituted Mosaic in the whirlpool hop bouquet. I think it will still be a nice comparison regardless. I'll post the results of the Columbus-Centennial-Nugget tasting when I get to pour it. That beer is conditioning at my other keezer at the brewery while this one is in my apartment keezer.

On with the tasting:

Appearance: golden and clear. Head sticks around and sticks to the glass.

Smell: big tropical aroma, mostly kiwi. The aroma is one-sided and lacks depth. By depth, I mean dankness.

Taste: the bitterness gets me first and lingers while I taste pineapple, tangerine and grapefruit. Then the bitterness seems to stay in the back of my throat. I can't help but think that this beer is hamstrung by the amount of bitterness it has. It either needs more malt to balance the bitterness (not the west coast DIPA style), more alcohol to give it more body (not what I want in this beer), or less bitterness. I rolled back the hop extract by 10ml in the last batch. I must have extracted more bittering from my whirlpool addition (14oz @ 212 to 200 degrees for 30 minutes) than in the last batch, which I held at 180 degrees.

Mouthfeel: dry, definitely an enamel stripper, which is appropriate. It feels substantial, despite the low finishing gravity, probably because of the high alcohol and Carapils.

This is a solid beer, but, being uber-critical of my own beer, here's what I want when I brew it again:

  1. More dimension on the hops. It lacks dankness. I want dank, citrus, and tropical notes in my west coast IPA.
  2. Less harsh bitterness. I love the clean bitterness that hop extract gives to a beer and the reliability I can predict based on adding 5, 10, 15, 20 etc. ml. The X-factor is definitely whirlpool hops and the extra bitterness that they lend. I'll drop the extract bittering addition on the next one and keep the whirlpool hop around the same. It will feel weird adding something like 30 IBUs in my bittering addition and relying on whirlpool additions to make up the rest, but this beer makes me think that will be the case.

Thursday, April 3, 2014

Mai/Doppelbock


I've been trying to get around to brewing a big lager for the start of spring since I started brewing. The recipe I came up with doesn't fall neatly into a style category, but is more of what I really wanted out of my bock: pale in color, slightly hoppier than average, and big, simple malt flavor from good German Munich malt.

The brew went off without a hitch. I overshot my target OG by a few points. It seems that a lot of brewers using this Avangard Pilsner malt find it gets an extra few points in efficiency vs others. I've had the same experience.

The brew team loves the new 24" whisk.

Brew notes:

Prepared 2L starter w/ 550ml of harvested yeast from Munich Helles three days before brewing. The yeast overload made this starter hit 1.010 in less than 24 hours.

Added 5g calcium chloride and 4ml of lactic acid to my strike water to reach a water profile of:

Ca: 52
Mg: 5
Alkalinity as CaCO3: 69
Na: 20
Cl: 74
SO42: 33
RA as CaCO3: -13

Mashed in low at 122 degrees for a protein rest. It was one hell of an endeavor temperature mashing up to 156 degrees. I was fighting my pump, which loses its prime when there is too much heat applied. It ended up taking around a half an hour to get up there and I scorched the bottom of my mash tun a bit. I need to improve this process.

Added 5.3ml of lactic acid to sparge water. The sparge water pH was brought down to 5.35 from 8+.

Initial mash pH was 5.6. Added 5ml lactic acid. Ended up with a final mash pH of 5.48. I don't want to add much more than 5ml of acid to the mash. Next time I brew this, I'll adjust my brewing salts or cut my water with distilled to get closer to where my pH should be. In my DIPAs or other pale hoppy beers that I use my municipal tap water for, I find that I add enough Gypsum to get my pH closer to 5.2 without such

PB OG: 1.060 @ 14 gallons. Added wort throughout the boil from the mash kettle, until the runnings were very low in gravity (by taste). The wort did not taste tannic, perhaps because I treated my sparge water to get into mashing range.

OG: 1.078 @ 12+ gallons. Set the fermenter at 48 degrees, but it never got down there. It hovered at 49-50 degrees, hinting at some yeast activity. I'll ramp it up 2-3 degrees per week and then on week four, go up to 65 degrees or so for a one week diacetyl rest. Then crash and lager.

Looking forward to enjoying this one in early May.

Recipe:

Batch size: 12 gallons
Estimated OG: 1.075 SG
Estimated Color: 8.0 SRM
Estimated IBU: 24.2 IBUs
Boil Time: 90 Minutes

Ingredients:
------------
Amt                   Name                                     Type          #        %/IBU         
5.00 g                Calcium Chloride (Mash 60.0 mins)        Water Agent   1        -             
4.00 ml               Lactic Acid (Mash 60.0 mins)             Water Agent   2        -             
17 lbs                Pilsner (Weyermann) (1.7 SRM)            Grain         3        51.5 %        
16 lbs                Munich I (Weyermann) (7.1 SRM)           Grain         4        48.5 %        
1.00 oz               Magnum [14.00 %] - Boil 60.0 min         Hop           5        24.2 IBUs     
1.0 pkg               Octoberfest/Marzen Lager (White Labs #WL Yeast         6        -             


Mash Schedule: Temperature Mash, 2 Step, Full Body
Total Grain Weight: 33 lbs
----------------------------
Name              Description                             Step Temperat Step Time     
Protein Rest      Add 41.25 qt of water at 129.3 F        122.0 F       30 min        
Saccharification  Heat to 156.0 F over 15 min             156.0 F       30 min        
Mash Out          Heat to 168.0 F over 10 min             168.0 F       10 min        

Sparge: Fly sparge with 8.85 gal water at 168.0 F