Brewed 04/08/2012 Easter Sunday.

JenEric hopes everyone had a great Easter weekend doing whatever you did. Hopefully you were brewing!

I’m sure you know what we did on our Easter Sunday since you’re reading this post. But if you haven’t gotten it yet ….. we BreWed!!!

 

This recipe we are really excited about. It’s an Imperial IPA grain and hop bill but the nuance is the type of yeast we are using and our fermenting temperature. We pitched our wort onto a Steam Beer yeast cake, WLP810.  See our Steam Beer post to read about that batch.

The grain and hop bills are a completely new recipe. The grain bill consisted of 2-row as our base malt, corn sugar to help get the 880GU we needed and to dry out the beer so we don’t have too much residual sugar from the malt. We also used a bit of Belgian Munich and Crystal 40 for some body, caramel and toasty flavors that will help balance out the crazy amount of hops and alcohol. With this beer we decided to clean out the freezer so the hop varieties we used were Warrior, Cascade, Chinook, Columbus, Amarillo and Simcoe rounding out to about 74IBU’s. We have an AWESOME Imperial WestCoast Amber recipe we made using this technique and it was so gooooooood we decided to try it out with an IIPA base style. Since we are pitching on yeast cakes it’s only natural we made it an imperial.

The day began around 7am in the brewery and with a huge mug of coffee. We began racking 10 gallons of Steam Beer  (Cal Common  – 7B) into a couple of kegs so that we could begin letting the yeast cakes get to room temperature (about 70 deg) for pitching later in the afternoon. After racking the Cal Common we set up the brewery out on the driveway and began our process.

Soon after we got going our great friends Bill, Melissa and Zim Batten came over to have an Easter Brew day with us.

We brewed and BBQed into the afternoon while our dogs Zoe and Zim played in the pool and had a dog version of an Easter egg smorgasbord.

Everything went off without a hitch as we’re getting used to our new system. The OG for this beer was 1.072 which was a bit lower than expected because we didn’t boil off quite as much water as we had planned and we got a slightly lower efficiency than we usually get.  Getting a lower efficiency is pretty typical when brewing imperial beers and since this is a new system, we just had to try it and see where we ended up. We racked the wort into the two carboys containing WLP810 yeast cakes around 6ish and we wrapped it up around 7pm.

Jenny aerated the beer with oxygen around 6:40ish and by 8

pm the blow off tubes were playing the sweet sweet sound of fermentation. It was a really great day.

Now we’re in full fermentation mode and we’re trying to keep the beer at around 60-64 deg using a water bath.

I think I say this with every beer we make but …. I can’t wait to try this one out!!

Check out the recipe here.