Tale of two Rye-PAs

Hop residue in a fermenting bucket

Stone brewery in the US made 120 beers last year, I made about 12. I'm a self confessed beer nerd, I read about beer, I listen to podcasts, i seek out new and interesting beers but try as i might I'm not a full time brewer (no where near) so I need to think a bit more carefully about what beers I want to brew.

The conventional advice to homebrewers is to not to try and make or try everything, focus on making a few things well. But it not easy to heed this advice. Its very tempting to want to try lots of ingredients and try lots of styles. In short there are so many things to try - I want to try them all! But I also don’t want to be lumbered with lots of beer no-one (including me) wants to drink.

But how it is possible to do this when you are only making 20l batches? This is exasperated when making stronger beers that take longer to condition and age - if you get it wrong you could be left with 40 pints of expensive mediocre beer.

One approach is to rely on recipes that others develop and share . These are a great starting point but they don't allow you to the experiment and understand how the different ingredients work with each other.

Another way is just  to make lots  more beer and be dammed. I've done this recently, and although i now have a few fully laden boxes around the house, it has also made me realise that there are limits to how much I can ferment at any one time, and also limits to how much I can store. Plus i need to find someone with a taste for my underwhelming pumpkin pie beer.

Instead,  this has led me to think about more and more ways to get more beers a single 20L batch or a single mash.

The first of these methods is where you finish with different dry hops. I was really quite surprised how much of a difference this makes to a beer which is essentially the same in all other respects.

I made 20l of cluster/mosaic rye-PA. Basically an IPA with 10% rye in the grain bill. Cluster hops were used for bittering, mosaic for aroma and flavour at the end of the boil. Then after primary fermentation i split the batches and dryhopped for 5 days differently:

Batch 1 - 20 g of Mosaic

Batch 2 - 20 g og Nelson Sauvin

After 6 weeks bottle conditioning (and during “dry January”) these were ready to try. Batch one has lots of tropical fruit flavour and aroma - but is a little underwhelming (i think i under did the late hops or didn’t let it cool fast enough and drove off too many of the hop oils). Batch 2 is quite different, the same under taste (bready rye and tropical mosaic) but really pleasing citrusy/melony nelson sauvin notes that cut through, like higher musical notes.

Key things learnt from this brew

• Don’t under cook the late hops - but do cool them quickly
• Splitting a batch for dry hopping is a really easy way to experiment with dry hop aromas
• Nelson Sauvin is a lovely contrast hop