The best of beers and the worst of beers

My wife tried one sip of this beer, screwed her face up and poured the rest away. Everyone else at the tasting table did the same. One of the beers I made for Beeroff4 was a clone of the very famous “pliny the elder” beer for a double/imperial IPA round. I followed a recipe from a forum, which had lots of continuous hopping with big C hops and tons of late editions, plus lots of dry hopping. In retrospect I didn’t chill the beer quickly enough, and I should have switched from late hopping to whirlpool hopping which I reckon avoids ,miscalculating the bittering of late hops by accident. I also tried out a new dryhopping method using 6cm tea eggs as hop containers.

In hindsight both of these issues prevented the beer from being as good as I would have liked. It scored the worst of any beer I have ever entered into anything. Every parent loves their own children, but I have to say I wasn’t feeling much love for this beer. I think because I didn’t manage to cool it quickly enough (this was the brew when I realised that the tubes connecting to my plate chiller were not heatproof) the flavour and the aroma additions contributed far more bittering that I’d intended. This beer scoured your mouth.

I ended up drainpouring quite a lot of this on Friday. I’d already given a bottle to some friends of mine who adore IPAs and wanted to try it. I warned them not to, I apologised when I realised how bad it was. So imagine my surprise when on Sunday I get an IM saying we loved your beer. The pumpkin one? No – the IPA! Didn’t you find it too bitter I asked? No – not for americans my friends said! They had another American friend visiting them. He wants to know if it’s a clone of Pliny the Elder, and can you send us any spare bottles. Wow – luckily I kept 4 bottles back just to see if it aged and got better with time. I’ll be posting those off to my friends now!

Re-engineering a disappointing IPA

Calypso dryhopping - hopefully an improvement.....

I few weeks back I wrote about two rye-IPAs I brewed, which were both ok but a little less hoppy than I had intended. The IPA that I dry hopped with Mosaic was the less impressive of the two, after a short time in the glass the hop pulled back significantly.

I wondered if I could re-engineer the beer? I had 4L of 5% beer, an empty 5L demijohn, 100g of calypso hops and a hankering for some hoppy beer. Calypso hops are described as having a pineapple flavour, with a bit of piney aroma, so a good contrast to the fruity bowl mosaic taste in the original brew. The hops were 2013 harvest, so even vacuum packed and kept cold (well as cold as my shed will keep them in the winter) they have probably lost a fair bit of potency. It’s worth explaining that I had a bag of calypso hops to experiment a bit with hops away from the IPA cannon, at current prices you can twice as many uncool hops as you would say simcoe or nelson sauvin.

Re-engineering the beer took two steps:

1. A hop tea
2. Dry hopping

The hop tea

The principle behind the hop tea is to steep some hops in some hot (but not boiling water) for a period of time to get lots of flavour, and not so much bitterness from the hops. Many of the hop oils are soluble at different temperatures, and some driven off at higher temperatures. In this instance I took 1l of boiled water and let it stand until it reached 90C  when I added 10g  of Calypso hops. I also added a small amount of DME so that there would be a little fermentation in the demijohn as the dry hopping process happened. The fermentation produces some flavours that are not extracted from the hops alone. Some people keep some heat on the tea to maintain a steady temperature, I didn’t in this case. I let the whole thing cool and then added it with the 4l of beer to the demijohn.

Spraymalt - ready to add for a litte extra fermentation

Dryhopping

The tea and the beer mostly filled the demijohn. There was enough space to add 10g [check] further of calypso hops to the demijohn. I closed the container with a lid and turned it over to make sure the hops were nice and wet, and then switched the top to an airlock and left for 10 days turning over every few days to maximise the amount of exposure the hops go to the beer.