Recipe Advice For A Deep, Piney IPA

[SeeFar]

What's your temp control method at the moment?

Don't go back to the drawing board just yet. Age it for a while - it hasn't been very long yet - and sample it as you go.

Temp control for the fermenter is under the desk in the coolest room of the house with a wet towel over it. The highest it would get would be 22, absolute max. The newly capped bottles are sitting in the bathtub with water today as it's supposed to hit 40.

I've lined up a mate with a trailer for the first week of Jan to pick up a second hand fridge. That's when I start getting a little more serious. I'll put through a couple of months of brews with proper temp control and then consider moving to partial mash/BIAB as right now I'm still on kit and a bit.

 

[mtb]

22 isn't outrageous. If you were hitting upper 20s I'd have attributed that to the alcohol flavours.

Give it time, brew another in the interim, mash higher. Are you designing your recipes in Beersmith or the like? Such tools are a good guide for balancing your recipes.

 

[manticle]

22 isn't outrageous for some lower gravity and for the end of fermentation.

However, my experience of bigger beers is that they really need large amounts of healthy yeast, low temps for the first few days. Don't forget active fermentation generates heat and lots of it in high gravity worts.

22 in a beer that size, unless it started at 17 with heaps of yeast, could well be the culprit.

 

[Coodgee]

that's some extreme attenuation!!

 

[SeeFar]

@mtb - not designing in beersmith yet. Given that I'm still only on kit and a bit I'm doing a lot of experimenting with different sugars (this one had half a litre of maple syrup in it), malts and hops as well as learning about yeast. The plan is to do another good half a dozen or so experimental brews whilst I read up - jesus zombie christ there's a lot to read. Popped a lid on a hoppy pale that I bottled a couple of weeks back and it's already really nice, so things are working in the right direction for this stage of the game.

@manticle - Yes, I usec 11.5gms of well hydrated US 0.5 the first day and followed up with another 11.5gms 24 hours later when I learned that I needed more for high gravity beers. I did struggle to get the temp below 21 on the first couple of days and I put that down to the heat generated by the yeast doing their thing.

@Coodgee - Yeah, I was shocked as **** when I measured it last night. Not sure what I did (right or wrong) to get that result.

 

[warra48]

1/2 litre of maple syrup will send you well on the way to a high level of apparent attenuation, as it is almost entirely fermentable. It is probably a large part of the explanation for the 1.010 FG.

 

[mtb]

Yeah definitely the maple. Even with kits, if you use software, you can calculate the effect of adjuncts and other ingredients outside of the kit.