Hot answers tagged ipa
11
Here is a pretty useful chart of different types of hops and the flavors they tend to impart on beer.
http://zekeshore.com/hops_v1.12.png
Things change depending on year and growing location, as well as hop style, but this is a good general idea.
10
Hop Primer:
Hops have two purposes in beer*: bittering, and hops flavor/aroma. The key thing is that when your'e boiling hops in hot wort, the flavor/aroma compounds will get boiled off.
As such, hops added early in the boil won't contribute much to a hoppy flavor, since they spend more time boiling- hence why they're called 'bittering hops'.
Hops added ...
8
First of all, there is no rule about time for beers. The beer makes its own schedule. In terms of aging, there are no rules either. The beer is ready when it tastes ready to you. I prefer IPAs without a lot of age on them so that the hop character remains fresh. But you should try one occasionally and see what you think.
7
You don't need to do anything to sanitize the hops. By the time your beer is going into a secondary, the alcohol and pH make it very resistant to infections. Just make sure to use a fine mesh bag. I didn't do that during my first attempt at dry hopping and it was almost impossible to get all of the hop particles out of the finished beer :)
7
What you're tasting is the distinct flavor of west-coast hops. Most people liken it to a citrus, grapefruit, or sometimes orange peel aroma and flavor. You might be getting guava from the combination of tangy hops and a sweet, sugar-cookie base from the malt.
Racer 5 uses Centennial, Chinook, Cascade, and Columbus hops. I've heard that Islander IPA uses ...
6
Well, wait another week. Sometimes it can be slow.
Assuming that's not the problem, the first suggestion would be to gently swirl the bottles individually to try and rouse some yeast. Cold crashing shouldn't have knocked them all out of suspension. It may have taken some of them out, but there still should be plenty to carb. Swirl, wait a week, and open ...
6
First, for an IPA, that recipe looks a little low on the late hop additions for flavor and aroma for modern US-style IPA.
Did you add the 1 oz of cascade as a dry hop called for in the recipe? Their recipe page has it listed on the same line with the yeast rather than the next line, and maybe you missed it; I know I missed it on the first read through. If ...
5
As a homebrewer, pretty much all of your beers will be "unfiltered". You can take steps to make them even more unfiltered, but pretty much, you'll always be there.
Most production breweries filter their beers through a variety of methods. When they make an unfiltered beer, they just skip those steps. The result is often a grainier beer, something with more ...
5
Keep in mind that published "standards" have little to do with commercial beer. The BJCP guidelines that most of us know are are for comparing one beer to another in a homebrew comp. They have little to no bearing on the commercial beer world, where the brewers can call their beers whatever they like and brew them however they want to. So, there's really ...
5
I'm assuming that your recipe is all-grain from some of your previous questions, but if it is an extract recipe you probably don't need to worry since most of the DMS boiled off. A little over a month ago I made a hefe (from extract) and only had a 15 minute boil time. Neither me, nor anyone who has tasted it can detect any DMS.
If it's all-grain, what ...
4
If you got consistent hydrometer readings over several successive days then yes, go ahead and bottle. 3+ weeks in the fermenter sounds like more than sufficient time for your IPA.
By the way, the bubble rate is not an accurate way of measuring fermentation activity. Bubbles can be produced by changes in ambient temperature and by simply walking past your ...
4
I have never counted bubbles - I presume you are referring to an airlock. Would you not be better using a hydrometer to measure the gravity to determine whether it is the right time to transfer to secondary? Perhaps a few degrees above your predicted final gravity. Say, 1012 - 1014. This might be a bit more empirical than bubbles, for as you rightly say, ...
4
Your brew will definite taste salty with that quantity of minerals added. I would use a third of that amount. 150ppm calcium and 250ppm sulphates is really the upper limit of what you can comfortably use in the beer, and you will still taste a little salt up front, but often it goes with the style.
Here are some guidelines from the HBT wiki,
...
3
Cascade is an American citrus flavored hop, English hops like East Kent Goldings or Fuggles are a better choice.
Secondly, "Cara" malts are generally a german type of malt. If you really wanted to be true to English form, try getting some crystal malts, and some biscuit malt.
Pale Ale malt is a good choice for a base malt so no worries there. (Especially, ...
3
Lower hops AND darker than expected?
If you are using extract, consider adding only about half of the extract at the start of the boil. The gravity of the wort will affect both the amount of carmelization (darkness) and hop utilization that the boil has. I typically use 2 cans/bottles of 3# (ish) of malt, add 1 in the beginning, and add the second about ...
3
If your beer had a Belgian-type yeast character, that's a sure sign you fermented too warm. This is especially important with English ale yeasts. A buddy of fine ended up with a decent Belgian Blonde by letting his pale ale with WLP007 Dry English Yeast ferment too warm. Definitely not the Pale Ale he was shooting for.
3
What makes a beer unfiltered is that there is no filter applied to the finish product prior to packaging process. I know that may seem obvious, but I point it out to emphasis that if you are expecting some sort of recipe difference, you probably won't find one.
The filtering process arguably strips beer of some elements such as colors, flavors and ...
3
American IPAs are supposed to have from 40-70 IBUs. Many commercial examples stick to the lower end of this spectrum, Brooklyn IPA has 45 IBUs for instance. IPAs with lower IBUs (40-50) are more likely to do better commercially since most people don't like crazy amounts of hoppiness in their beer.
However, many beers do well on the higher end of this ...
3
Wow, that average pH is low compared to my water just over here in the Pittsburgh suburbs. Mine is 8.3. Your water is pretty neutral, mine is alkaline.
Anyways, here's my suggestion: Don't adjust your water this time. Water adjustment is a pretty technical topic and if you want to start doing it, be prepared to experiment. I recently switched to all ...
3
Unfortunately, you may wind up with a cloudy beer. Boiling will have "set" the natural pectin (the stuff that makes jams and jellies thick) in the raspberries. This will likely result in a beer that will never really get bright and clear. Not that I would expect an IPA to be crystal clear anyway, really.
When I have added fruit like this to a mead ...
3
You say its taking "Far Longer." how long have you been fermenting? What is the gravity of the pils? if your IPA gravity is 1008/1007 over the last two days I would say your pretty near finished. Assuming your IPA was in the 1050s/1060's when you started; you got great attenuation, I would check gravity again tomorrow and if your getting the same range go ...
2
You can try Muntons Pale Ale malt - it's a good solid base that's fairly clean and doesn't bring oodles of that soft biscuit maltiness and complexity that you get with the Maris Otter malt. It's highly modified, so well suited to single infusions and has good diastatic power so you can add adjuncts to the mash also.
Being a pale malt rather than a ...
2
The cold crash likely just shocked your yeast into dormancy a bit. If you added an appropriate amount of priming sugar they should carbonate. It will just take more time. I always found two weeks a little short for me.
If you notice there is plenty of yeast on the bottom of the bottles you can gently invert them and rouse the yeast up into the beer. ...
2
Watching airlock bubbles is not the best way to judge fermentation. That's repeating from other answers, but I'll continue by adding something you're going to see more and more of as you read "current" thought on homebrewing:
There's (generally) no need to secondary. You should be able to leave beer on the yeast for several months before it begins to get ...
2
You want to take the brew out of primary when it's finished fermenting, otherwise you risk bottle-bombs from the still-fermenting beer.
You can safely tell when fermentation is finished by taking hydrometer readings daily; when the readings are constant for 2 days, you're done.
Sometimes fermentation can 'pause' due to environmental factors so you don't ...
2
With the grist bill you used, there's very little chance of DMS. Even with pils malt, a long boil is not always needed to prevent DMS. There's more chance of DMS the lighter your malt is. I've found that vigor of boil is at least as important as length of boil. I do a very vigorous boil and I can't recall ever having goteen DMS with a 60 min. boil.
2
IPAs tend to be cloudier when dry-hopped, particularly if you dry hop with pellets. I brewed an IPA where I did no dry hop, but rather made a hop tea in a French press where I steeped what would be my bittering hop pellets in a pint of the not-yet-boiling wort after lautering. When I hit a boil, I pressed the tea off the hops, decanted it into a container ...
2
There is not a lot of information about the Islander IPA but Bear Republic uses Chinook, Cascade, Columbus and Centennial. My guess is that what you are associating with guava is the citrus/fruity character of Centennial and Cascade, although I'm sure there is a combination of all four. The aroma and flavor of centennial reminds me if mandarin oranges in ...
2
I agree with the advice given in the other answer that your own judgement tells you when the beer is ready. However it's still possible to give an estimate: I'd say 5 weeks from brewday for low alcohol, under 4%, 7 weeks for medium - 4-6.5% For big beers, you'll need to see how the beer cleans up.
As others have said with an IPA, on the one hand you want to ...
1
Saaz hops is great for citrus. Many homebrewers never brew with Saaz... not sure why. Perhaps because it is traditionally a lager hop, or because it is slightly more expensive.
Bitter with Magnum, flavor/aroma addition with Saaz. I just brewed a 20L batch of Blonde Ale using a base of Pils malt, 1 lb rye, 1 lb corn sugar, Magnum bittering, Saaz for 30 ...
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