CNYBrew.com: Tasting the IPA

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Tasting the IPA

Well I wish I could say that the beer lived up to the name, but alas, nothing ever does.

The IPA is all hops and no malt flavor. It's kind of sad, even my wife commented on how light it was.

The good news is that I know what went wrong. Remember, this predates my understanding of adjusting recipes to my system (and brewing experience) efficiency. I have since received a wealth of information from some of the bloggers on this site and others (Groves Beer Log and Bad Ben) and from the forums on Beer Advocate. This has helped me to understand where I was going wrong and help me to figure out how to get "Back on Track!"

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

So, let us in on what you learned to make a difference for the next batch.

Travis said...

I need to adjust my grain bill. I was taking recipe's as they were given and making no adjustments to account for efficiency in my system.

So I should have been using the spreadsheet that I created to adjust the recipes. That's at least the obvious adjustment that I can make.

Another interesting adjustment is in pH. If you listen to the Basic Brewing podcasts there is an interview with John Palmer, author of How to Brew, that covers pH it pretty easy to understand terms.

I don't think I am quite ready to mess with the pH just yet, but I think that in the next batch I should be able to have better luck with an adjust grain bill.

Anonymous said...

Your O.G. was only 45, so it's going to turn out light in maltiness to accenuate and feature the hops. Some posters on Beer Advocate have slammed Pacman for scarfing up all the flavor and turning into alcohol, so with low extract and hungry yeast, you get that super low F.G. Respectable ABV.

True, not the flavor or moutfeel of an IPA, but instead a unique beer. Radical beer. Your German hops and orange and cilantro must make for a subtle, but exotic spicy flavor. Wish I could try it!

BTW, I've been doing countertop partial mashes, getting efficiency between 50% and 65%. It's tough without a good mashtun and lots of patience.

Cheers,
Chris

Travis said...

Chris,

All this is true. When I first started drinking this brew it had such a strong hops flavor with almost no malt that it was gross (almost a dump out). But I have had it sitting on the tap now for a few weeks and it has matured nicely. There is still almost no sweet maltness, but inplace of that is the citrus and hops melding. The bitterness edge has dulled and it's a nice really light beer to drink with a decent ABV.

I am full mashing and getting between 50% and 65% so far. I have been doing a lot of reading and I am going to adjust all of my recipes from now on as well as practice some better mashing.

The Mash Tun that I built works out very well as far as keeping the heat, cost effectivness and useability. The only thing I would change is drilling the hole at the bottom lower.

Cheers!