Super Bad IPA

Named by my oldest son.

Recipe

Batch size: 5 gallons

Grain bill:

• 7 lb pale malt
• 1 lb organic Crystal 60
• 4 oz Crystal 120
• 4 oz pale chocolate malt

Hops:

• 2 oz Fuggles @ 60 (4.5%)
• 1 oz Amarillo @ 30 (8.6%)
• 1 oz Amarillo @ 5 (8.6%)
• 1 oz Saaz @ 5 (3%?)

Yeast: Windsor (picked by my youngest son)

Prep

Jan 2, 2011: Mashed overnight; temp was low: 60C/149F.

Brew Day

Jan 3, 2011: Down to 53C/128F overnight. 6.5 gl yield, 1.040. Plenty dark. Had to do a split boil, as I was doing it inside...a rare cold day, but it was good for chilling. Final gravity 1.046. Upstairs to ferment; 14C in the room.

Fermentation took a while to take off; I'd forgotten what it's like to go w/o a starter.

Dry-hopped with 1 oz of Saaz January 10th.

Bottling

January 16, 2011: 100g dextrose. Lots of truub on the bottom. FG 1.011, so 4.4% ABV. 16.5 litres yield. Running into problems with the bench capper; it's coming down crooked and not capping very well.

Tasting

January 21, 2011: Wow, the dry hopping really comes through. This tastes very good for being so young. Perfectly carbed out of the basement, where it was sitting @ 15C. Amazed at how good this is.

March 1, 2011: Catchup. First off, the big dry hop flavour did not last very long; it faded and changed within a couple weeks. Still good, just not that wonderful fresh flavour....peaked early.

Second, I took a bottle to my homebrew club and it was infected. Ack! It was one of the capped bottles, and my suspicion is that it had leaked. It took me a while to realize what was wrong; it just tasted off. Sad about this, paranoid given the last infected batch.