BATCH #15 – ONE POUND OF HOPS DIPA

Date	Brew:3/4/2014	Rack:3/24/2014	Bottle:3/30/2014
Days	0	20	28

Recipe:

Brewing Classic Styles, Hop Hammer, modified for partial boil.

Goals:

Put together a super hop powered alcohol rocket! Try for something like a pliny or Heady Topper. Moderate bitterness, very low sweetness and body, and a pop of fresh hop character from aggressive dry-hopping.

Brew Notes:

This was the half dme / 3 gal h2o / full hops brew as explained in the book. No boilovers. We didn’t have/use a frozen gallon so cool down was slow. 0.25 oz of one hop (maybe centennial) wasn’t added at ko because I didn’t want to leave a packet 3/4 full and open until dry hopping. The dry hop will be big! remember to boil the dry hop bag. Fermented in 6-gallon plastic bucket. Most whirlpool hops (all but 1oz) were put in a mesh grain bag. Boil hops were bagged as well and strained out. Measured gravity 3/24 = 1.018 during racking to 5gal carboy. RD would like to boil, dechlorinate and add roughly a gallon of water to the bottling bucket in order to bring the 3.75 gals of 9.8% beer up to 5 gallons of 7.37% beer. Still strong, but more drinkable.

	OG	FG	ABV
Recipe	1.088	1.015	9.56%
Recorded	1.094	1.019	7.37% (9.8% before diluting)

Fermentation notes:

At racking it tasted DAMN good. Pretty strongly bitter, and quite a bit of hops aroma and flavor. The dry hop will bump that up quite a bit.

Bottling notes:

At bottling it tasted more muddled, dull, lifeless to ross. After 1 week in bottles it recovered and was much better, yet still not fully carbonated. 4/24 – still not fully carbed, but nice hoppiness and tastes great.

Label:

Bottled with green caps and “14” in sharpie (because that’s the beer’s name, or possibly we just screwed up.)

Tasting notes:

After sitting this beer is exactly what we hoped it would be. Super hoppy, with a good kick in the ass.

Conclusion:

This turned out great! I do not regret diluting it down to (only) 7.37% one bit. It still has a ton of flavor (287 IBU), without supergluing you to your couch. The only bad thing about this recipe is the cost. If we re-brew, definitely look into online ordering for the hops. Hop cost was more than half of the total bill, and was over $50 if I recall correctly.

Update: BOTTLE BOMB!! 5-15-14

Last night my wife woke up to a strange sound, and saw a trickle of beer flowing out into the hallway. One bomber from this batch got a bit too much pressure. I’m unsure if it was a bad fill or a bad bottle. It’s been in the bottle for around a month and a half now. The broken edge of the glass looks somewhat suspicious, because it has some very thick and very thin spots. I’m hoping it’s just a bad bottle but I’ll keep an eye on the others. I guess it’s just one more reason to switch to kegging!

One other theory on this explosion is: perhaps the yeast was slowed down / hampered during secondary by the high abv. Then when we diluted it at bottling it would have ended up with too much available sugar.