Saturday was a beautiful Wisconsin winter day. It was 11 degrees outside, wind blowing and just plain cold. I'm happy to say that I brewed without having to worry about the low temps and freezing propane tanks. The indoor brewery is really starting to click.
I set out to brew an IPA from my neighbor's hops that we harvested last fall. He grew a couple of nugget hop plants and we were able to harvest a couple pounds of hop cones off of the vines (that's dry weight). I settled in on using a fairly simple IPA recipe. 11lbs of 2 row, 12 oz. caramel 30 and 8oz of sugar. I heated up my strike water to 164.5 degrees and then began the 90 minute mash at 155. I struck a little high at 156 and let the temp settle down to 155. The mash ran pretty well and I collected 7 gallons into the boil kettle. I started my boil without a hop addition. The recipe I came up with was all later additions. My first hop addition was with 20 minutes left in the boil. I dumped in 2 oz of nuggets at 20, 5 and 0 minutes left in the boil. At the five minute mark I dropped in a Whirlfloc tablet and a couple teaspoons of yeast nutrient. Chilling went well and I was down to 65 degrees in about 5 minutes.
The only gotcha moment was when I was collecting my wort for the fermenter. Lesson learned: whole hops suck up a lot of wort. I think I lost about a gallon to the 6oz of whole hops. Overall a good day and now my yeast monkeys are flying around the fermenter. I'm looking forward to putting 2 more oz of hops into the keg and having a nice IPA on tap. If things ferment out as they should, we'll have a nice 7% roughly 65 IBU IPA on tap!
I set out to brew an IPA from my neighbor's hops that we harvested last fall. He grew a couple of nugget hop plants and we were able to harvest a couple pounds of hop cones off of the vines (that's dry weight). I settled in on using a fairly simple IPA recipe. 11lbs of 2 row, 12 oz. caramel 30 and 8oz of sugar. I heated up my strike water to 164.5 degrees and then began the 90 minute mash at 155. I struck a little high at 156 and let the temp settle down to 155. The mash ran pretty well and I collected 7 gallons into the boil kettle. I started my boil without a hop addition. The recipe I came up with was all later additions. My first hop addition was with 20 minutes left in the boil. I dumped in 2 oz of nuggets at 20, 5 and 0 minutes left in the boil. At the five minute mark I dropped in a Whirlfloc tablet and a couple teaspoons of yeast nutrient. Chilling went well and I was down to 65 degrees in about 5 minutes.
The only gotcha moment was when I was collecting my wort for the fermenter. Lesson learned: whole hops suck up a lot of wort. I think I lost about a gallon to the 6oz of whole hops. Overall a good day and now my yeast monkeys are flying around the fermenter. I'm looking forward to putting 2 more oz of hops into the keg and having a nice IPA on tap. If things ferment out as they should, we'll have a nice 7% roughly 65 IBU IPA on tap!