Sunday, February 13, 2011

Second Batch - Dogfish Head 60 min IPA clone

OK, so I haven't had an update in a while.  I tried the first bottle of my first batch at around 10 days.  Frankly, it was pretty good!  Not amazing, but good.  As the weeks have gone by, the carbonation seems to have gotten better.  It doesn't seem to form a great head, but I think it's getting better with age.

So, now on to batch #2.  A friend is having a crawfish boil at the end of March, and I decided it would be good to have an IPA to bring.  So, I looked around on homebrewtalk.com and found a Dogfish Head 60 min IPA clone.  It's a little more advanced than my first, all-extract, batch.  The basic flow was like this: steep a pound of malt grain in a grain bag in hot water for 20 min.  Discard the grain, and add malt extract.  Bring to boil and add several types of hops continuously for 60 min.  Cool the wort, add to fermenter, and pitch yeast.  So, we decided we would brew on Saturday.  Headed down to my LHBS only to find he had everything but a particular brand of hops called Simcoe, for which there is really no good alternative.  So, we packed up the kids and took a roadtrip down to De Falco's on the other side of Houston. Of course, in order to justify driving an hour each way for 2 oz. of hops, we decided to spend the rest of the day at the Houston zoo...

OK, so back to the house, stopped at Rudy's for dinner, put the kids in bed, and now it 9:00 - brew time at last? Unfortunately, no.  The recipe I had stated a 2.5 gal boil.  I therefore figured my 3 gal pot would be sufficient.  Unfortunately, it's 2.5 gal before adding the almost 10 lbs of extract!  So, off to the local grocery store to pick up an $18, 36qt aluminum pot made for steaming tamales.  Yeah, it's a little flimsy but, hey, whatever gets the job done...

So, got the pot, got home, and unfortunately discovered that our glasstop electric stove is not really up to the task of boiling 2.5 gal of water + 10 lbs of extract in a 36qt pot.  Go figure.  It got there eventually.  Boiling/hopping the wart was fun.  It didn't take long for the whole house to smell hoppy...

After boiling for an hour, you're supposed to cool the wort as rapidly as possible.  Ideally this would be done with a wort chiller.  But I don't have one of those, so I was left trying to cool it in my sink filled with icewater.  Only, the ice maker in the fridge decided to stop working.  Oy vey.

After getting the wort down to 75-80 deg, and rehydrating the yeast in warm water, I poured the wort through a strainer into the fermenter and shook it up to aerate it.  Topped it up to 5 gal with bottled water, and pitched the yeast around 2:00 am.  Total brewing time?  About 4 hours.  Yikes.  Looks like it's about time to invest in a propane burner, a wort chiller, and a "real" brew pot.

I took a gravity reading right before pitching the yeast, and it read 1.022 SG.  This was a little worrysome, as it was supposed to be more like 1.070 SG.  The specific gravity is a measure of how much "stuff" there is dissolved in the water, and we assume it to be mostly sugar.  By measuring the gravity before and after, you can estimate how much sugar the yeast have eaten, and therefore estimate the alcohol content.  I'm not sure why my reading was so low, but my best guess is that I didn't mix up the wort and added water enough, and so only sampled the water on top.  I don't see how you can add 10 lbs of sugar to 5 gal of water and not increase the specific gravity...  At any rate, by 1:30 this afternoon the airlock was bubbling.  So, I don't think the yeast are having any trouble finding food!