#37 Smoked Black IPA - Brewday

Recipe     -     Brewday     -     Tasting

Yeast:
I mixed up a starter for a vial of White Labs San Diego Super Yeast.  The vial is a little old, packaged in August, but with the starter it shouldn't be a problem.  I will be using this for the rye ale as well, so I made a big starter, 1.2 gal, and split it 60% and 40%.

I didn't end up brewing the next weekend as planned ... or the weekend after that ... or the weekend after that.   The starters are now 4 weeks old, and taste a little sour.  This isn't ideal, but I'm crossing my fingers that since it's getting kegged it won't be a big deal.


Brewday 12/7/14:
I started off the morning, by brewing a rye ale, and now it's time to get this IPA underway.  It makes for a long day, but if I can brew 10 gal of beer in 11 hours instead of 5 gal of beer in 8 hours then sign me up.

The rye ale went smoothly.  After weeks of sub-freezing temperatures things have warmed up significantly, which is great for my personal comfort, but really dragged out the cooling time.  Without a brew kettle to drain into, I had to extend my mash to 2 hours.  That shouldn't make a difference though, after a 90 min mash, an additional 30 min shouldn't make much difference to either extraction or conversion.

With the rye ale out of the brew kettle, I could finally move on to lautering and batch sparging.  I turn on the burner while sparging to heat the first runnings near boiling and reduce the time to boil when I finally get to full volume, but this time I got the heat a little high. The first runnings reached a hard boil before I even started draining the second runnings.  I doubt it's a big deal, but if there's a bit extra melanoidin formation than normal I wouldn't be surprised.


Fermentation:
45 sec 02, yeast pitched at 63F, temperature set to 65F.

4 Days: Temperature set to 68F.  Everything seems fine.

6 Days: Fermentation looks complete, added dry hops.

12 Days:  Racked to keg, SG down to 1.011.  First off, this is super bitter.  I hope as the polyphenols drop this settles down a bit.  I'm worried I used too much black patent malt as well.  Oh well, two more weeks til we find out for sure.  Placed in cold room at 37F (no gas).