New Brew February 8th, 2013
Sorry for the lull in updates, the holidays and a vacation interfere with home brewing…
The vanilla bourbon stout turned out pretty decent, I’m going to let several bottles age for a while and see how they are in a few months.
We took a trip to Hawaii, a little baby moon for us. It was nice to spend each day in sunny 80 degree weather in the middle of January, I would highly recommend all you non existent readers try it out!
I brewed another IPA a few weeks ago. This recipe is a clone of the Kern River Citra IPA recipe. This was my first beer using my new stir plate to create an appropriate sized yeast colony. The fermentation actually seemed to start fast, but it went for a long time. Regardless, I hit my target final gravity. One mistake on this brew was that I didn’t add yeast nutrients or a whirfloc tablet during the last 10 minutes of boil… the beer is a little hazy, but not bad for a home brew.
OG 1.068
FG 1.011
I am now dry hopping the beer over a 12 day period.
First dry hop addition Citra and Amarillo
Wait 3 days
Second addition Citra
Wait 3 days
Third addition Amarillo
Wait 3 days
Fourth addition Citra again!
Wait 3 days
Transfer to keg.
I am planning on filtering this beer with a 1 micron water filter setup. I don’t know if the beer will end up being and clearer, but I do believe any hop material still floating will be caught by the filter. If the filter does make the beer clearer that would be a nice side effect of the filter.
Once that’s done I will start force carbing the beer. If all goes as planned we should be serving Citra IPA around Feb 21st.
My next planned beer is a black IPA, I’m hoping that I can create an American IPA, but with a dark SRM, slight roast, and big dry hop flavor. I’m not overly concerned about the nose on this beer, so my plan is to leverage hop bursting for the flavor, and a light dry hop to bring back some of the nose that will be lost from CO2 during primary fermentation.
I’m thinking something like a roasty brown ale with the hop profile of something like Fremont’s interurban IPA.
Until next time faithful readers!
–Chris