002 Fresh Squeezed IPA Clone

I’m sitting here enjoying the fruits of my labor from my first homebrew, is there any better feeling? So after that monster of a grain bill, I wanted to go back to some basics and do a simple (ish) IPA. Yes, I’m basic. I really enjoy the balance of malt and hop in Deschutes Fresh-Squeezed IPA so I looked at a few clone recipes including this one for guidance. I also purchased a few new items to build on some of the difficulties I had last time, so let’s get to it.

Recipe

Brew Day

The mashing instructions for this recipe were more complicated than I wanted to try to reproduce so I varied a bit here. I’ve realized that with an 8 gallon pot I have just enough to boil for a 5 gallon batch after boil off but not really enough to mash in the full amount of strike water. So I went with 5 gallons of strike water and decided to do a batch sparge of the other 3.75 gallons in a bucket. I heated to 168° and put my bag in and poured in the full grain bill and stirred it up which brought my mash in temp to 159°. Cover and wrap in a blanket and let that sit for 60 minutes.

Here you can see a very basic but incredibly useful upgrade, a big mesh strainer. I was able to lift the bag up and get this underneath and let it drain on its own. It’s not quite deep enough so the bag made a bit of a mess dripping on the sides but it was the largest I could find online. This let me start to bring the wort back up to a boil while I drained off the liquid and did my batch sparge in a separate bucket. I had 3.75 gallons of lukewarm water ready and just dropped the bag in, mixed it up, and let it sit for 15 minutes and then added those runnings back in to bring my boil volume to 7 gallons. I have yet to etch volume markings on my kettle but after this I’m determined to get that done. I hate not knowing exactly where my volumes are at until I’m transferring to fermenter.

The rest of the brew went without a hitch, brought it up to 211° for a rolling boil and added the Nugget hops in for 60 minutes (last time I used mesh hop bags and felt like the hops don’t circulate well, this time I just threw them right in). At 10 minutes remaining I threw a Whirlfloc tablet in as well as some yeast nutrient (~5 tsp). 1 oz each of Citra and Mosaic at 5 min and then another 1 oz of each at flame out with a 10 minute hop stand. Another new thing I bought to help with my wort chiller is this small pump. I hooked it up to the wort chiller and put it in the sink with an ice bath. For awhile I had the runnings going to the other side of the sink while they were still hot and once it cooled down closer to ground water I had it recirculate with the ice water. I did run out of ice in our ice maker, I think I could have cooled things down faster with a full bag of ice on this step. But otherwise seemed to work well and I got things down to 75° in a little under an hour.

Transfer to my Brew Bucket where I have two more toys to play with (I know, this is going to be a problematic part of the hobby). In my last brew I had no good way to aerate the wort prior to pitching. This time I purchased this pretty cheap small pump that is made just for this with a small aerating stone at the end of the tube. Sanitizing everything at this point I dropped it in and fired it up for about 10 minutes. I was a bit surprised to see it didn’t add a lot of activity to the wort, it must be incredibly fine and I think it might be meant to run through a stopper and leave for longer before pitching. I’ll have to read up more on that. I also purchased a Tilt Hydrometer which I’m super excited about. I had so much trouble with readings last time and while a refractometer made this easier this time around the idea of getting regular readings from my couch without taking any samples was too good to pass up. I sanitized this thing and dropped it in and I’ve got a reading of 1.069 OG which matches what the refractometer was showing. Pitched some US-05 and sealed this up with an airlock and moved it to the basement. I’ve got one more dry hop addition that will come in 7 days and then I’ll wait until fermentation stops and bottle it up.

Fermentation and Bottling

I have the Tilt connected to Brewstat.us which is giving me some awesome graphs and keeping track of where things are with the fermentation. I was happy to see airlock activity going strong after just 12 hours and we’re good on both temperature (settled around 68° in my basement) and a steady drop in SG.

I ended up getting a Raspberry Pi connected to the Tilt so that I could stop walking down to the basement every day to get a reading. I had it setup to log every 15 minutes and found the accuracy pretty good. You can see one blip on the graph which was the dry hop charge that bumped up gravity a bit but it came back and settled at 1.020 FG.

Once FG was stable I brought the Fermenter up and set it on the back porch for the day as a lazy cold crash (of course it we an unseasonable 55° day so it didn’t drop much). For bottling I decided instead of the carbonation tabs to use priming sugar and my kettle as a bottling bucket which also helped avoid trub. Still, I’ve already bought a fine mesh kettle hopper for future boils because the amount of trub was insane. I may also try to somehow filter what gets passed through the ball valve of the kettle to avoid more particulate than necessary.

Tasting

I started off thinking 2 weeks was the right amount of time for bottle conditioning. The more I read and taste I think that’s probably an ok starting point but that many bottles benefit from at least 3-4 weeks which is all the more convincing me that it’s time to build a keezer and start kegging. The idea of being able to finish and force carb a beer much sooner is really appealing versus a month minimum from grain to glass.

My first tasting here is 2 weeks in the bottle and things are falling flat but I’m not sure yet to contribute that to not enough time or something else. Color is a dark orange/brown, not far off from the beer this recipe clones. Maybe if mine had more clarity it would be even closer. The beer pours with a thin head that trails off after a few minutes. There’s an aroma of burnt sugar very strong on the nose. Taste is strong malt profile with less citrus quality than I would have hoped for with so much Citra and Mosaic. It’s honestly not a good beer at the moment, but I’ll give it some more time and hope that the malty sweetness will give way to a bit more carbonation and brighten up things a bit.

Update: Another 2 weeks has cleaned this beer up quite a bit. Carbonation is on point and that burnt sugar has mellowed out significantly allowing some of the citrus to come through. I still don’t think this is a recipe I would go for again due to how malt-forward it is, but it’s certainly drinkable.