Now, I am no hop-head, but living in “the land that hops forgot” it is nice to blow my senses away with some Humulus Lupulus now and then. When I started my brewday on saturday, I was having one of my hop cravings. So what did I do? I upped the hops on the recipe for the 100% Munich malt IPA. It should be more of an American IPA now, rather than the barely-an-IPA I was going to brew. It was a bit of a last minute decision, but when I smell the hop aroma coming out of the fermenter, my senses thank me for the change in recipe. I decided to up the hops, but I also decided to make a smaller batch this time. I wanted to save enough of the Nelson Sauvin hops for some Brett brews that are planned. I only made about a 12 liter (3.2 US gallon) batch as opposed to my normal 20 liters (5.3 US gallons). Since this was a smaller batch I decided to use my old small mash tun. Its nice to have a small mash tun like that but I realized that I need to rebuild it. I will probably be using the smaller mash tun more than the big one so I can brew smaller batches but more often. One thing I forgot to take into account was the different boil-off rate on the stove inside that I discovered on the last brew, so my OG was 1.057 instead of the calculated 1.062. I am trying to be less anal about my brewing so officially this doesn’t bother me, but inside I am kicking myself. Overall, the brew day went alright, but I am still a bit rusty since this is only my second brew since my year long hiatus. Guess that means I need to brew more!
3kg Munich
I will most likely be dry-hopping this beer also. Perhaps 10g of both the Amarillo and Nelson Sauvin.
[...] 2 07 2009 That’s the name I have given my munich malt IPA. This brew has turned out to be quite a fantastic, balanced IPA. It has the necessary hop bite, [...]
[...] Homebrewer’s Forum” homebrew competition was an American, me! The winning beer was Hop Nest which you will be familiar with if you follow this blog. Besides the obvious prestige, I won a [...]
How did this turn out?
Well, it turned out fantastic. It even took “best of show” in a small homebrew competition here in Belgium. I later brewed another variation of it which was also great. That later one was a split batch. Half was fermented with US-05 again and the other half was fermented with Brettanomyces Clausenii. For the first 5 months the US-05 version was a fantastic IPA. When the hops started to drop off and the beer aged too much then the Brett version really started coming into its own. Somehow the Brett made the hops still seem fresh. That brett version turned out to be a truly amazing beer after about 7 months. By far my favorite version!