What is coming in the near future…

I took a look into the Metabrewing crystal ball and saw several posts that will be coming in the near future.
Here are some of the upcoming posts…

Recipes:

• 100% Brett fermented 0 IBU IPA (you read that right, there are no typos)
• Berliner Weisse aged on Brett
• Saison inspired by Fantôme
• India Pale Saison

Experiments:

• The great Brettanomyces showdown - the same base wort 100% fermented on 9 different single brettanomyces strains…and then sampled (of course).
• Using extracted hop oil for flavor/aroma contribution

Equipment/Process:

• My semi-automated brewing setup
• Keg cleaning
• Brewing water

*If you feel the urge to be notified on these upcoming blog posts, you can subscribe via email, RSS/ATOM feed, or add me on Google+, Facebook or Twitter.

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American Black Ale (Black IPA) Tasting Notes

Even though I can drink, and even enjoy, a well-made American Black Ale (Cascadian Dark Ale, Black IPA, etc.), it's a rare day that I order one given a number of options to choose from. I find myself picking a quaffable APA/IPA if I am in the mood for hops, or selecting a porter/stout if I'm craving a dark, malt-driven beer. Roasted malts and hop aroma/flavors can be made to work together, but the whole isn't necessarily better than the sum of its parts.

Here are tasting notes from my American Black Ale that had 17 oz of hops in the flameout and whirlpool, and another 14 oz of dry hops. The recipe was designed as a 12 gallon batch, but I only netted about 9 gallons of beer, thanks to those thirsty hops.

My goal was to make an American Black Ale that accentuated the hop characteristics and downplayed the dark malts as much as possible. For the recipe, read the original post. Here's how my version turned out:

Appearance

It pours from the tap with frothy, cappuccino-like head that fills half the glass and then persists for over 10 minutes, leaving behind sticky tan lacing and a thick ring of foam that persists until the glass is empty. The beer is deep brown to black. When held up to a light it remains opaque except for a reflection that makes its way through the bottom of the glass, highlighting the beer's clarity. I don't typically think of dark beers in terms of their haziness, but this beer has none.

Aroma

Even after 2-1/2 months in the keg, a big hop presence leads the way, first with pine and cedar, then followed quickly with orange rind, dank and catty notes. Getting past the hops, a hint of fruity dark chocolate is present, but I'm reaching for it. The color makes me look for aroma characteristics that correspond to a dark beer. No sign of roast or toast in the nose.

Taste

Bright citrus hops are the first thing coating the front and sides of the tongue, followed by a flavor that I can only describe as reminiscent of a dark chocolate bar infused with pieces of orange. There's a lingering bitterness (more than I care for).

Mouthfeel

Medium body and dry, with a slightly oily presence, which I'm assuming is from the massive amount of late addition hops in the recipe. The hops cling to the back of the tongue, leaving behind a lingering dry astringency that substantially adds to the perceived bitterness. 

Overall Impressions/Final Thoughts

For the style, I'm happy with how this beer turned out. There is more hop aroma wafting out of the glass than I have ever encountered in an American Black Ale. The Midnight Wheat has done its job in adding color while contributing little to no roasted malt flavor. It still provides some dark chocolate undertones, but they are more muted than the commercial examples of the style that I have tried.

If it is possible to go overboard with hops, this recipe is living proof of it. Changes I would consider for the next attempt would be to reduce the total volume of hops (0.75-1.0 oz/gal), raise the original gravity (1.077-1.085), or both. The malt balance is great, but the astringency on the finish contributed from polyphenols in the hops is a bit over-the-top for my taste for a beer of this gravity.

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Recirculating Dry Hops: Extract More Aroma Oil in Less Time

When I think of a good “hoppy” beer, my mind conjures up interesting aroma and flavor profiles. Bitterness units barely factor in. A hop forward beer that has lost (or never really had) aroma becomes a boring and uninteresting beer.

What if you could get more aroma oil extracted from your dry hops with less time? Would you do it? That question almost sounds rhetorical.

Early last year I came across an Indie Hops blog post titled, “More Aroma Oil, Faster: The Dry Hopster’s Holy Grail.” With a title like that, I had to keep reading. The post cited a study by Peter Wolfe and Dr. Tom Shellhammer at the Oregon State University Department of Food Science which compared the aroma/flavor potential of two dry hopping materials (whole cone hops vs. pelletized hops) and the effectiveness of two methods for dry hopping (stirred vs. unstirred). All dry hopping took place at 23.2°C (73.76°F). Both sensory analysis (a tasting panel) and instrument analysis (measurements of compounds) were performed on samples taken at 0.5 hours, 2 hours, 4 hours, 6 hours, 24 hours, 4 days, 7 days, and 12 days of exposure to hops.

Peter Wolfe’s thesis, A Study of Factors Affecting the Extraction of Flavor When Dry Hopping Beer, is published on Oregon State University’s website. I read all 92 pages of it, which took me a while because I found myself searching Google every other page to research a new [to me] unfamiliar term.  There were several interesting findings in the study. Here are a few highlights:

• Pelletized hops resulted in faster extraction and more hop aromatic compounds compared to dry hopping with whole cone hops.
• Stirring hops resulted in higher overall aroma compound extraction and more intense aroma perception than unstirred hops.
• Stirred pellet hop aroma compounds were nearly fully extracted after 24 hours.

“Say what? 24 hours?!”  (That was my reaction, anyway.)

Aroma, Aroma, Aroma

As pervasive of a practice as dry hopping is in modern beer brewing, there is a lot of confusion as to what is exactly going on during the dry hopping process. This gives rise to all kinds of practices and procedures for how to achieve the best results. This post is not attempting to address every aspect of dry hopping (bitterness contribution, antimicrobial properties, etc.). For that, I would recommend reading Peter Wolfe’s thesis as well as the book, For the Love of Hops, by Stan Hieronymus.  This post is only addressing the primary goal of dry hopping: aroma.

By far, the greatest reason that dry hops are used today is to add hop aroma and flavor (a combination of aroma, taste and mouthfeel) to beer. While other hop components (alpha/beta acids, polyphenols, glycosides and bio-transformed hop compounds) affect the overall flavor experience (see section 1.3 of Wolfe’s Thesis), the primary components of hops that directly contribute to aroma while dry hopping are terpene oils and sulfur compounds. The goal when dry hopping is to extract those compounds out of the hops and into the beer.

Most homebrewers follow a similar procedure to one another when dry hopping: steep the hops in fermented beer. Regardless of whether whole cone or pelletized hops are used, if hops are placed in bags or allowed to free float, or if the dry hops are added to the primary, secondary or keg, the universal practice for dry hopping at the homebrewing level is to allow the hops to soak in beer post fermentation without any form of agitation.

On the other hand, the commercial breweries that are best known for aromatically hoppy beers all use some form of agitation or extraction beyond simply steeping the hops in the beer. Dogfish Head, Russian River Brewing and Firestone Walker use a “Hop Cannon,” Sierra Nevada uses a “Torpedo,” and New Belgium and Stone use “The Slurry Method” (chapter 8, For the Love of Hops). Commercial breweries have efficiency and time constraint requirements that homebrewers do not have, but as Peter Wolfe found in his study, a greater level of hop aroma compounds are extracted through agitation.

My dry hop agitation setup

After reading Peter Wolfe’s thesis, I was determined to come up with a way to agitate dry hops at the homebrewer level. The first idea was to build some sort of false bottom stir plate for my fermentation fridge, and then spin a large stirbar in a glass carboy to agitate the hops (I still like this idea). However, I recently obtained a stainless steel conical fermentor and wanted to move my fermentation of hoppy beers to the conical. What I came up with was the following setup, which as it turns out is almost exactly the same setup that was used for agitation in the study conducted by Peter Wolfe (I ran it by him).

Below is a diagram (and below that, a video) of how I do my dry hop agitation. The setup is slightly different than what is pictured below. I do not own a Blichmann brand conical, and I use the standard inline head rather than the center inlet head. I’m also sans a racking cane on the conical at the moment. I would highly recommend one is used with this setup. Without a racking cane, hop matter will come through the racking arm port. It will require a significant amount of dumps from the bottom to get all of the hops out. I waste a lot of beer dumping hops out of the bottom before I have clean enough beer to rack to a keg. A racking cane will allow the tube to point up and out of the hop slurry so that clean beer can be racked without having to dump any hops.

Here is a YouTube video of my setup in action:

Continuously recirculating dry hops in the fermentor

What you’ll need

Assuming you already own a conical fermentor, to pull this off you’re looking at purchasing the following:

• (1) March or Chugger Pump (I use one that I already had)
• 3-4 ft of 1/2” ID tubing (I use silicone, because I can boil it before use to sterilize it)
• 4 connectors for the inlet and outlet tubes. Everyone’s setup is different, so this will vary depending on your configuration. My conical uses 1.5” triclover fittings, and my pump is 1/2” NPT, so I purchased:
  (1) 1.5”x1/2” barb fitting and (1) 1.5”x1/2” barb with 90° bend (I like the 90° fitting more because it can get out of the way, so I’d go with 2 of those if I did it again).
  (2) Blichmann Stainless QuickConnector - 1/2in. 90° Elbow Barb. For whatever reason, the Blichmann elbow barbs barely have any barb at all on them. The Blichmann straight barb fittings are much more grippy and in line with what you would expect a barbed fitting to be like, so I would go with those next time.
• (4) hose/tubing clamps (large) for the fittings

Non-conical fermentor configurations:

I have not attempted this in any fermentor other than my conical. I would like to see how other brewers approach this situation with carboys and Sanke kegs. If you have recommendations to share in the comments, please do so.

Carboys:

In addition to the stirbar idea that I mentioned above, a carboy cap can be modified to accommodate two racking canes, like this. You can then follow a very similar process to what I did with my setup. You would want to ensure the hole was not cut too large, because oxygen making its way in will be counterproductive to the goal of making an aromatic hoppy beer. If you would rather use a stopper than a carboy cap, Morebeer sells a #6.5 stopper with 2-holes, but the 2nd hole is too small for a racking cane, which means that changes would be needed. A ball valve would need to be added to this configuration to be able to adjust the flow rate of the pump.

Sanke kegs:

Before I purchased my conical, I used the Sanke fermentor kit from BrewersHardware. As with the carboy cap above, the blowoff hole could be modified to accommodate a 2nd racking cane.

Results to come in a follow-up post. Stay tuned...

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Split batch: Redemption and Sanctification Clone Recipes

For me, homebrewing = experimentation. I have yet to ever brew the same beer twice. While I’ve repeated certain aspects of some recipes, I always tweak something the next time I brew it. It helps me learn.

Another way that I learn is by comparing and contrasting. I’ve been to many beer tastings, but the ones that have taught me the most are the ones in which I can do side-by-side tasting  rather than one after the other. I can smell one, then smell the other; taste one, then taste the other. The sensory experiences are so close to one another that it helps my brain distinguish between minute differences that I otherwise wouldn’t pick up on.

This was an inspiration for why I chose to build a system that brews 12 gallon batches. It allows me to spend the same amount of time brewing one base beer, and then do different things on the cold side of the equation. I can compare yeasts, fermentation temperatures, hops, dry-hopping schedules, and so on. The learning experience has been so much more than it would have been doing single batches, and it barely costs me any more time or money to pull it off.

Two beers that I’ve always enjoyed from Russian River Brewing Company are Redemption and Sanctification. Redemption is a Belgian Single, also referred to as “Enkel.” Traditionally, Trappist breweries would make this lighter version of their regular beers for consumption by the monks at the monastery. Redemption is similar to a Belgian Blonde, but is lower in gravity.

Sanctification is a non-barrel aged sour golden that is advertised as being primary fermented with 100% Brettanomyces, although Vinnie has stated that they also add Lactobacillus and Pediococcus from a house mixed culture.

After doing a little digging around, I found that these two beers were extremely similar in the malt profile, with the distinguishing differences being that Redemption is lighter on the non-2 row malts (3% each, compared to 5% each), and Sanctification is 4-6 (depending on the source) points higher in original gravity than Redemption. The Russian River Brewing Company website shows the original gravities at 1.048 and 1.052. In emails and interviews, Vinnie has quoted them at 1.052 and 1.058.

For my split batch, I went with the Sanctification malt bill and chose the higher of the two target gravities because I was most interested in getting the Sanctification beer down. A Belgian single can be whipped up anytime, but a sour beer requires a little hell of a lot more time before it is ready for consumption. A  portion of the hop schedule was moved to a 0 minute addition, which lowered the projected IBUs somewhat.
WLP545 Belgian Strong Ale yeast was used for Redemption because my local homebrew shop was out WLP530 Abbey Ale Yeast and there wasn’t time to order online. For Sanctification, ECY20 Bug County was used rather that the complex culture mix that Vinnie gave in his recipe.

Brew date: 03/24/2012
Batch size: 11.5 US Gal
Estimated/Actual OG: 1.058/1.056
Estimated IBU: 20.0
Estimated SRM: 4.2
Estimated ABV: 6.0% (Redemption)/7.0% (Sanctification)
Estimated total efficiency: 72%

Water:
Started with R.O., then additions to match Beersmith’s “Antwerp” profile.

Grain:
85.0% (21.60 lb) – American 2-row (Great Western) – 2.0 SRM
5% (1.27 lb) – Vienna malt – 3.5 SRM
5% (1.27 lb) – Acid malt – 3.0 SRM
5% (1.27 lb) – White wheat malt (Great Western) 2.4 SRM

Hops:
80 min – 1.48 oz Styrian Goldings (5.40% AA)
15 min – 1.48 oz Styrian Goldings (5.40% AA)
0 min – 0.5 oz Styrian Goldings (5.40% AA)

Other/Adjuncts:
15 min – 1 tsp Wyeast yeast nutrient
15 min – 0.5 tsp Supermoss
10 drops Fermcap

Mash:

50 minutes @152°F
10 minutes @168°F

Boil:
90 minutes

Yeast:
WLP545 Belgian Strong Ale (Redemption)
ECY20 Bug County (Sanctification)

Results/Notes:
Due to what must have been poor programming on my part, the fly sparge process turned on 38 minutes into the mash while I wasn’t paying attention (a pitfall of automation). The manual ball valve to the boil kettle was closed. The mash tun read 16 gallons (probably 5 gallons above the grain bed) before it was noticed and stopped. The mash temp was brought back up to 152°F for about 10 minutes before ramp out.

The sparge went fast (15 minutes), which likely added to the poor mash efficiency.
Pre-boil gravity was 1.043. Target was 1.047. The boil was slowly rolling due to some burner issues I had been having. At 90 minutes, the gravity was at 1.046. The boil was extended by 40 minutes. Gravity read 1.056 at knockout.

The batch was split into two carboys. A 1.5L starter of WLP545 Belgian Strong Ale was pitched into one carboy, and ECY20 Bug County was pitched into the other. Fermentation was at 68°F.
The Belgian Single was given a 1-week primary and 2 week secondary before racking half to a keg and bottling the other half. The Sanctification was given a 2 week primary and then racked to secondary for what might be forever, or a year, whichever comes first.

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The freshest sources for hops

What I find interesting is that I rarely see the farm, brand or supplier of hops mentioned when discussing sources for hops. Typically, varietals are mentioned as a commodity. Someone will post, "[company name] has this year’s Cascade for $11/lb," as if Cascade from one source is the same as any other source, with the only difference being price. I never used to give this much thought, until this last year...

Last year I purchased Citra hops from two different suppliers (both the current harvest year), and there was a huge difference between the aroma of the hops. It wasn't even close. You could take one whiff from the first bag, and then a whiff of the other, and it was night and day. One had a big citrus/tropical aroma; the other, not so much when compared to the first. Had I not had the two there to compare, I might have thought the one with less aroma was fine. After all, it still smelled like hops. It's just that it was so much more muted than the other source that I dumped out the hops that had less aroma. Why use inferior hops in something that you’re going to spend a considerable amount of time, energy and money into making?

Shopping for hops is like shopping for produce. You can shop based on price per pound, or you can shop based on quality (however you define quality is up to you). Farmers that properly grow good crops in rich soil, wait to pick them until they’re ripe, and then deliver the fresh produce to local shops for immediate purchase, simply cannot compete on price with the mega farming corporations out there that are cutting costs at every step of the process. For example, I can buy oranges at the local grocery store that are decent (taste like what my mom bought, likely at the same kind of grocery store), or I can get oranges from a local farmers market or CSA that are the juiciest, most flavorful oranges I've ever had. It's like [excuse the pun] apples and oranges. This same analogy applies to hops.

HopUnion 1 oz and 1 lb bags

Of course, you can overpay for crappy, poorly treated hops as well (my LHBS, for one). Price isn't what makes one hop supplier better than another. I'm not familiar with every hop supplier out there, but I've ordered from several online sources and found HopUnion’s nitrogen flushed hops to be quite fresh and fragrant. I typically buy 1 lb bags from LabelPeelers because of the cost savings. This year my pound of Amarillo from LabelPeelers came in (16) 1 oz packages. I like the idea of the 1 oz HopUnion bags for the sake of freshness. Keeping the hops in a sealed, nitrogen flushed environment is better than opening the same bag several times throughout the year (even if you reseal it with a vacuum sealer).

Hops Direct 1 lb bag (partial)

HopsDirect seems to have fresh hops, too, but I find their 1 lb vacuum sealed foil bags a little difficult to work with. They often come hard as bricks, with the pellets being stuck together. Farmhouse Brewing Supply offers a wide variety of hops in convenient 4 oz packages, and the prices are good. I’m not a big fan of the packaging, but most of the packages remain sealed. I haven’t compared the hops that I’ve bought from Farmhouse Brewing Supply with other suppliers/retailers.

Farmhouse Brewing Supply 4 oz bags

I'd like to try hops from IndieHops. I like what they stand for and I hear good things about them, but the minimum order of 11 lbs per hop is prohibitive for a homebrewer, and they only supply a limited number of hop varietals. IndieHops seems to cater more to small craft brewers than to homebrewers, and sell first to contracted accounts. This might be a good company to do a group buy with.

Other than the big online homebrew shops, some other hop suppliers that I’ve seen people ordering from are Yakima Valley Hops (they package their own hops at reasonable prices), Nikobrew (not the best pricing, but cheap shipping), and some discount eBay sellers. I have no experience buying from these companies.

I'd be interested in hearing others' thoughts on this subject in the comments. Has anyone else found a difference between hop suppliers? Are there other good sources for quality hops at reasonable prices?

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Low pressure burner testing

The first question I had when designing my brewing system was what type of energy to use. My first choice was steam, but that was a pipe dream (pun intended). Next was electric for a variety of reasons, but that option required me to upgrade my electric panel, which was cost prohibitive. That left me with either propane or natural gas as options. I decided on natural gas because it is more economical, the idea of refilling tanks regularly was not appealing, and I could easily see myself running out of gas in the middle of a brew session.
An initial test run on the system produced poor results. After nearly 2 hours of heating, it hadn’t reached a boil. Some testing was needed to increase the performance of the burners (a link to the spreadsheet data is at the bottom of the page).
The areas to be tested were:

1. burner height – the distance from the burner to the kettle
2. heat transfer – using a more conductive metal to transfer thermal energy from the flame to the kettle
3. ventilation – insufficient ventilation chokes the flame
4. gas pressure – the burners were designed to work optimally at 11” WC of pressure, while most utility companies deliver gas to residential buildings at 7-9” WC.

For all tests, 10 gallons of 75°F water was heated on a single 10” low pressure burner, and temperature readings were taken every 5 minutes.
burner height

The first tests (test #1 in the chart below) involved adjusting the burner mount height. The heat shield/burner mount has a split open back to allow for rear ventilation above the burner, and comes with 3 sets of holes for adjusting the distance between the burner and the bottom of the kettle. The distance from the bottom hole to the top hole is approximately 1”, and while there was a slight difference in performance between the top mounting hole and the bottom, the results were not significant (which is why only one of the tests is charted). After 50 minutes, the best configuration was at 170.7°F.
heat transfer
I consulted my friend/assistant brewer, Eric, who is a mechanical engineer by trade, and for test #3, a homemade heat sink was built out of a thick plate of aluminum and aluminum angle iron to capture more heat from the exhaust and transfer it to the kettles. This increased heat transfer, but after 50 minutes the water had only reached 187.3°F.
ventilation
The next test involved creating a chimney (test #4). Just like with a house chimney, less dense hot air rises and is replaced by more dense, cooler air. This is referred to as the “stack effect”. The greater the thermal difference and the height of the chimney, the greater the stack effect.. We built a semi-enclosed chimney out of a 90 degree register box and sheet metal to force air to flow up from the bottom of the burner and out of the back. We tested it with and without a 6’ chimney (that’s not a typo, it was 6 feet tall), but both tests resulted in lower temperatures than with the aluminum heat sink.
gas pressure
I had the gas company come out and test/adjust the pressure to the house. I was at 7.3” WC at the main line to the house, and 6.7” WC at the line to my brew rig (acceptable range is 7-9” WC, according to the technician). He adjusted it up to 7.5” WC at the brew rig, which is the highest he was allowed to adjust it, but then volunteered to show me how to adjust the pressure myself “just in case I wanted to know how it works.”  I increased the pressure to approximately 8.6” WC, switched out the flex lines to the burner for larger diameter flex lines that were previously on order, and then ran two more tests.
Test #6 was with both the aluminum heat sink and the chimney at the new increased gas pressure. After 50 minutes, the temperature was 182.6°F, just shy of test #3, which took place before the gas pressure to the house was increased. This suggested that the chimney setup wasn’t helping.
In test #7, the chimney was removed and only the aluminum heat sink was used. At 50 minutes I was at 206.7°F, and at 55 minutes I was boiling.
Test #7 was by far the best results out of all of the tests, and is what I chose to stick with. A spreadsheet with the full test results can be found here. Below is a chart showing the performance over time for the tests mentioned above.

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Color-blind: An American Black Ale

Color-blind: An American Black Ale

American-Style Black Ale. That’s the name the Brewers Association has settled on in their 2012 Beer Style Guidelines for the artist beer formerly known as Black IPA, Cascadian Dark Ale (CDA) and India Black Ale (IBA) (as well as some lesser known variants such as American Dark Ale and Avery’s New World Porter).

First off, we can all drop the suffix “style” from the name, given its unhelpful redundancy (it is a style by way of its inclusion in a style guideline). That leaves us with American Black Ale (ABA).

When I first heard the new name, I was a little unsure about it. It’s generic and boring, unlike the paradoxical beverage that it refers to. It’s also descriptive and absent of any regional ties within the U.S. This is a subject that I won’t get into because it has already been argued by Matt Van Wyk in favor of CDA, and then rebutted by Greg Koch in favor of Black IPA.

ABAs seem to parallel their IPA cousins in how they are expressed regionally (I’d like to state my bias: most of the American Black Ales I have tried have been on the left half of the country, and to this date none that I have tried have called themselves American Black Ales).

In the Pacific Northwest, they hold firmly to the moniker Cascadian Dark Ale (a name reserved almost exclusively for this region), and generally have a more “balanced” Northwest approach to the malt/hop bill. Even if the beer is hopped to high heaven, in most cases there will be a distinguishing malt character supporting the beer. Pacific Northwesterners are not afraid to let a little bit of roast and dark crystal malts party in your mouth with the citrus and pine flavors of regionally appropriate “C” hops.

Just like how West Coast IPAs tend to be dry on the palate, lighter in malt character, ludicrously dry-hopped, and then dry-hopped again, Black IPAs from California not-so-shockingly embody the same characteristic as their IPA cousins. They just wear a black suit to the party. “Balanced” isn’t often used to describe a good example of a Black IPA from the West Coast.

It’s likely that the American Black Ale style will be included in the next revision of the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) style guideline (used by the American Homebrewers Association), which is due for a revision if they keep with their self-proclaimed 3-5 year revision cycle (last revision was 2008). The 2012 Brewers Association style guideline (used at GABF), gives us the following description:

American-style Black Ales are very dark to black and perceived to have medium high to high hop bitterness, flavor and aroma with medium-high alcohol content, balanced with a medium body. Fruity, floral and herbal character from hops of all origins may contribute character. The style is further characterized by a balanced and moderate degree of caramel malt and dark roasted malt flavor and aroma. High astringency and high degree of burnt roast malt character should be absent.

The marriage of roasted malt flavors with the tropical/citrus/stonefruit hop flavors that I seek in an IPA, produce an ugly kid with an annoying personality. The flavors are not complimentary and detract from each other. For a dark, hop-forward beer to keep my attention, the roast, chocolate and even the darker crystal malt characteristics need to be subdued.

In my first stab at this style of beer, I took an IPA recipe that I’m familiar with and then added Midnight Wheat by Briess, a 550°L bitterless black malt that has the lowest “roast” character of any black malt that I could find. It was specifically created to limit the bitter, astringent and roasted characteristics found in dark roasted malts. The goal was to create a beer that would fool a blindfolded taste tester into thinking the beer was an IPA.

Color-blind: An American Black Ale
Batch size: 12 gal
Estimated OG: 1.067
Estimated IBU: 59
Estimated SRM: 31.7
Estimated ABV: 5.7%
Estimated total efficiency: 75%

Grain:
84.0% (24.76 lb) - Rahr 2-Row - 1.8°L
6.0% (1.77 lb) - Midnight Wheat - 550°L
4.0% (1.18 lb) Carapils - 2.0°L
3.0% (0.88 lb) Crystal 60 - 60°L
3.0% (0.88 lb) White Wheat Malt - 2.4°L

Hops: (all pellet)
60 min - 1 oz Millenium (15.9% AA)
10 min - 1 oz Zythos (10.9% AA)
10 min - 2 oz 7Cs (9.9% AA)
10 min - 1 oz Falconer’s Flight (11.4% AA)
10 min - 1 oz Amarillo (10.3% AA)
10 min - 1 oz Galaxy (14.0% AA)
0 min - 2 oz Zythos (10.9% AA)
0 min - 4 oz 7Cs (9.9% AA)
0 min - 2 oz Falconer’s Flight (11.4% AA)
0 min - 2 oz Amarillo (10.3% AA)
0 min - 1 oz Galaxy (14.0% AA)
+25 min - 1 oz Zythos (10.9% AA)
+25 min - 2 oz 7Cs (9.9% AA)
+25 min - 1 oz Falconer’s Flight (11.4% AA)
+25 min - 1 oz Amarillo (10.3% AA)
+25 min - 1 oz Galaxy (14.0% AA)
dry hop - 2 oz Zythos (10.9% AA)
dry hop - 4 oz 7Cs (9.9% AA)
dry hop - 2 oz Falconer’s Flight (11.4% AA)
dry hop - 2 oz Amarillo (10.3% AA)
dry hop - 2 oz Galaxy (14.0% AA)
dry hop - 2 oz Cascade (6.4% AA)

Yeast:
WLP007 Dry English Ale Yeast (decanted 1.7 L starter +1 vial)

Mash:
50 minutes @ 152°F (Midnight Wheat added 20 minutes into the mash)
Mash out @ 168°F and fly sparge for 35 minutes.

Boil:
90 minute boil.
0 minute hop additions added at flameout.
+25 minute hop additions added after 0 minute additions had been whirlpooling for 25 minutes, then stirred in hop spider for 5 minutes with a sanitized stainless steel spoon before recirculate through chiller to drop temp.
15 minute rest to allow for settling of trub, then transferred to conical fermenter at 70°F. Conical was put in fermentor fridge and dropped temp to 64°F before pitching 2 liter yeast starter. Held at 65°F for 2 days before allowing to naturally rise to 67°F until completely fermented.

Results/Notes: (tasting notes)

• This was the first time since getting my mill that my pre-boil and original gravity readings were exactly on the numbers. I added the Midnight Wheat about 20 minutes into the mash to further reduce any potential astringency that might come from the malt.
• The hop bill on this recipe was big (38 oz). I’ve realized that for beers with massive hop additions, my hop spider isn’t an ideal solution for getting good extraction of the hop oils into the wort, while keeping the hops out of the plate chiller. I need to work on new solutions for future batches that allow me to recirculate back into the boil kettle while chilling (my ground water isn’t cold enough to go straight out, even in the winter).
• I seem to have found my limit for my continuously recirculating dry hop setup. 12 oz of hops in my conical chokes the pump. It also leaves such a large hop pile at the bottom of the conical that I can’t properly dump enough of them out of the ¾” ball valve before it clogs.
• I need a rotating racking cane for my conical that can be turned up and out of the hop pile. A lot of dumps were required before I could get hopless beer to transfer into kegs.
• I designed the recipe as a 12 gallon batch expecting I would end up with 10 gallons of beer. After hop losses in the kettle and several yeast and hop dumps, I netted 8.5 gallons of beer in kegs.

Tasting notes can be found at this post.

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