25 or 6 to 4 IPA

25th batch, and a great song.

Recipe

Batch size: 5 gallons

Grain bill:

  • 8 lb pale malt
  • 2 lb Carastan 30
  • 1 lb organic wheat malt
  • 2 oz pale chocolate malt

Hops:

  • 30 g Willamette @ 60 mins
  • 40 g Willamette @ 20 mins
  • 53 g Sterling @ 10 mins

All the hops were from this year's harvest.

Yeast:

  • Wyeast 1968 (London ESB) - washed from 155 Pale Ale, April 2010

Prep

September 28, 2010: 2 litre starter...but only 60 g of dry malt extract, and I need 200g. I added the rest of the liquid malt extract I have -- about 3/4 cup or so. Didn't measure gravity, but the final volume was about 1.5 litres.

Brew Day

October 1, 2010: 7 gallons; overshot my temp, so stirred to cool and added 0.5 gallon tap water. Eventually got to about 170 F, and I usually get a 10 F drop in temp. (Whoops -- that's not correct; closer to 15 F, now that I check miy notes.)

However, I dropped my floating thermometer on the ground (dangit!) before I could measure the mash temp, so I had to use a candy thermometer. Temp was probably about 150F -- but I don't trust this thermometer as much, and the scale is much coarser.

October 2, 2010: Forgot to record the volume, but should have been about 6.125 gallons. Changed the hop schedule to the above on a whim. Thought the gravity was 1.062, but that must have been first runnings (which surprises me, since I do a sort of BIAB setup and didn't expect differences in runnings) because another reading showed 1.045. FG was 1.058 or 1.059, which was close to what I was aiming for (though I don't think I actually calculated it out).

Yeast was pitched with the help of my wonderful assistants:

My assistants help pitch My assistants help pitch

In the fermenter by 9am, thin layer of kreusen by 1pm. Nice!

Bottling

Date:

Tasting

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