PM#16 – Yo-leven India Pale Ale

Having actually done the brew before writing the introduction to this recipe, I fear that anything I write as an introduction will be pointless as this wasn’t a very successful brew day. Everything was fine until I measured my original gravity. It came in at 1.063! I almost couldn’t believe my eyes; I’ve never missed my gravity targets by this much before. Adn the sad thing is, I’m still at a loss on why it happened. There was a big gap between weighing out my malts and doing the actual brew. Because of all this hot weather we’ve been having, I abandoned this brew and just bagged up the crushed malt in ziploc bags. Is it possible Ieft some base malt out of the recipe and forgot about it? Maybe another culprit might be the mash temperature? I mashed at a pretty high temperature of 69.5C. While I was shooting for a slightly higher mash temperature, I did go a little overboard. But I didn’t adjust with cold water because I didn’t think the mash temperature would be high enough to kill off any enzymes. And I still don’t believe the mash temperature is the problem here. Maybe I under-estimated the amount of hop soakage. No more than usual though. I only got 14 litres into the fermenter. [EDIT: it turns out my inaccuracy was due to a dodgy weighing scales. See comment in notes below.]

Pretty disappointing, however, I’ll try to set out where I was going with this attempt at a re-brew. I wanted to make the beer lighter and colour and reduce the malt flavours, but still leave plenty of caramel sweetness in the beer. I’ve used different hop varieties (including my old favourite, Cascade) because I was getting a lot of grassiness from the last hop combo, which I suspected was from the flamout additions of Columbus and Summit.

The following is a summary of the changes to the grain and hop bills in this attempt.

• No corn sugar in this attempt. The idea was to not only up the ABV slightly (by 0.2%), but to see what effect removing the corn sugar would have on the mouthfeel and flavour of the beer. Given the problems I encountered with the gravity, it’s just as well I removed the corn sugar!
• This attempt has slightly more crystal malt, just 50g. But it’s split between 75% C15 and 25% C40.
• The amount of wheat malt is much the same, I reduced it by 10g only to have the same percentage as the other specialty malts. I reduced the Munich malt by 50g but added 50g more biscuit malt this time. I’m not sure whether any of these changes will have much of an effect though.
• This attempt used a sachet of fresh US-05 whereas the last attempt was fermented by a pitch of US-05 slurry.
• This attempt has a traditional 60-minute bittering addition, instead of the 30-minute bittering addition used in the first attempt.
• There’s three different hop varieties here, instead of six used in the last attempt. The flameout addition is slightly smaller too.

Recipe

Boil Size: 17.00 l
Post Boil Volume: 15.11 l
Batch Size (fermenter): 15.00 l
Bottling Volume: 15.00 l
Estimated OG: 1.075 SG
Estimated Color: 10.6 SRM
Estimated IBU: 71.9 IBUs
Brewhouse Efficiency: 65.00 %
Est Mash Efficiency: 65.0 %
Boil Time: 60 Minutes

Ingredients

2.25 kg Pale Malt, Maris Otter (3.0 SRM) , 50.6 %
0.30 kg Caramel/Crystal Malt – 15L (15.0 SRM) , 6.7 %
0.15 kg Biscuit Malt (23.0 SRM), 3.4 %
0.15 kg Munich Malt (10.0 SRM), 3.4 %
0.15 kg Wheat Malt, Ger (2.0 SRM), 3.4 %
0.10 kg Caramel/Crystal Malt – 40L (40.0 SRM) , 2.2 %
0.35 kg Light Dry Extract (8.0 SRM) , 7.9 %
20 g Centennial [11.50 %] – Boil 60.0 min, 42.5 IBUs
1.00 kg Light Dry Extract [Boil for 20 min] (8.0 SRM), 22.5 %
0.50 Items Whirlfloc Tablet (Boil 15.0 mins)
24 g Cascade [7.40 %] – Boil 15.0 min, 9.6 IBUs
24 g Centennial [11.50 %] – Boil 10.0 min, 10.2 IBUs
24 g Cascade [7.40 %] – Boil 5.0 min, 6.0 IBUs
36 g Chinook [13.30 %] – Boil 0.0 min, 0.0 IBUs
1.0 pkg Safale American  (DCL/Fermentis #US-05)
30 g Cascade [5.50 %] – Dry Hop 5.0 Days, 0.0 IBUs
30 g Chinook [13.00 %] – Dry Hop 5.0 Days, 0.0 IBUs

Notes

24/08/2013 Brew Day – As I said above, everything was going fine until I had the beer in the fermenter and realised I had missed my target gravity by 12 points! A bit of a disaster, but hopefully it will still make a tasty beer. This is likely to be pretty bitter as the IBUs are possibly too high for the OG. I might abandon my plans to do the double dry-hop on this after all. I’ll leave this in the fermenter for 2-3 weeks before bottling.

27/08/2013 – Well, the mystery has been solved… My assistant brewer and I noticed this morning that our digital scales are completely off! I did think at the time that my hop additions looked pretty small compared to previous batches. The 1.35kg of malt extract that I weighed out looked a little small too, which would explain the lower gravity. So what now? Now that I know that both my malt additions and my hop additions were lower than intended, maybe they’ll balance each other out. The wort I tasted from the sample jar was pretty sweet, not much hop bitterness coming through, but hopefully it will be okay. I considered dry-hopping this twice, in line with my original plans, but I might just be wasting hops on what might be an under-bittered and cloying beer. Now I’m thinking of just doing the single dry-hop and chalking it down to experience. What have I learned? Calibrate the weighing scales before attempting any brewing. It’s pretty bad that I can’t trust a Salter digital scales, but there you go. Fuck it, anyway…

31/08/2013 – This brew has been an unmitigated disaster and one borne out of pure carelessness. I was looking over this recipe the other day, just contemplating how the balls-up with the kitchen scales might have affected both my gravity and bitterness levels, and then it hit me.. I had completely forgotten to add my flameout addition of 36g! Complete and utter lack of attention. At this stage in my brewing career, I really should have noticed the low level of hop material in the kettle at the end of the boil. My first idea was to do a really aggressive (and probably multi-stage) dry-hop. But I don’t want to be chucking expensive hops into a brew which is so wide off the mark of my recipe. Probably better to chalk it down to experience and get on with a re-brew. So I dry-hopped today with 30g of Chinook and I’ll probably remove the hops in a weeks time, then bottle.

I had planned on re-using the yeast from this beer in a new Imperial red ale which I’m going to call “Diabolus in Lupulus”. It’s an extension of my Big Dawg Amber Ale, but using a completely different malt bill in order to achieve a completely different style of amber ale. Now however, I’m abandoning that plan in order to re-brew the Yo-leven (again!) and I’ll roll over the yeast from this batch. I even bought a new bag of Citra hops to use in the re-brew.

07/09/2013 – Bottled with 100g of dextrose (13.5l x 2.5 vol). Got 24 bottles from the batch as expected. No issues with bottling. Great hoppy aroma from the FV. The brew has a prominent bitterness, quite to my surprise, given the low IBUs. Saved the yeast slurry for the next batch of Yo-leven, which I’m brewing tomorrow.

16/10/2013 – Nearly 5 weeks in the bottle and my thoughts on this are a little mixed. Surprisingly, it seems to have just enough bitterness to carry the ABV and level of residual sweetness. But as we know, bitterness fades, so I’m guessing this one will have to be dispatched fairly quickly. It was a little yeasty, but that could be because the bottle hadn’t had any cold-conditioning in the fridge; I just took the bottle from outside. Maybe I just poured it carelessly, who knows. One disappointing aspect of the flavour is that it has the hop flavour level of an ordinary pale ale, not the huge hop bomb I was aiming for. Maybe when the yeast drops out further and conditions a bit more, the hop flavours might be more prominent. It’s also got great clarity.

I’ve adjusted the recipe in BeerSmith to account for the dodgy scales (which was ready approximately 50% of the actual weight). As such, my malt extract and hop additions were too small. Here’s the updated/actual recipe:

Recipe

Boil Size: 17.00 l
Post Boil Volume: 15.11 l
Batch Size (fermenter): 15.00 l
Bottling Volume: 15.00 l
Estimated OG: 1.061 SG
Estimated Color: 9.5 SRM
Estimated IBU: 36.6 IBUs
Brewhouse Efficiency: 65.00 %
Est Mash Efficiency: 65.0 %
Boil Time: 60 Minutes

Ingredients

2.25 kg Pale Malt, Maris Otter (3.0 SRM), 57.7 %
0.30 kg Caramel/Crystal Malt – 15L (15.0 SRM), 7.7 %
0.15 kg Biscuit Malt (23.0 SRM), 3.8 %
0.15 kg Munich Malt (10.0 SRM), 3.8 %
0.15 kg Wheat Malt, Ger (2.0 SRM), 3.8 %
0.10 kg Caramel/Crystal Malt – 40L (40.0 SRM), 2.6 %
0.30 kg Light Dry Extract (8.0 SRM), 7.7 %
10 g Centennial [11.50 %] – Boil 60.0 min, 22.5 IBUs
0.50 kg Light Dry Extract [Boil for 20 min](8.0 SRM), 12.8 %
0.50 Items Whirlfloc Tablet (Boil 15.0 mins)
12 g Cascade [7.40 %] – Boil 15.0 min, 5.1 IBUs
12 g Centennial [11.50 %] – Boil 10.0 min, 5.4 IBUs
12 g Cascade [7.40 %] – Boil 5.0 min, 3.2 IBUs
1.0 pkg Safale American  (DCL/Fermentis #US-05)
30 g Chinook [13.00 %] – Dry Hop 7.0 Days, 0.0 IBUs

Looking over the recipe, it’s pretty easy to see why the beer lacks the intended hop punch – it’s got only 76g of hops! Even a standard pale ale would have more hops than this. It’s a useful illustration though, of how important those late/flameout additions are. After forgetting my  flameout addition, I can really see a big difference in the aroma.

30/10/2013 – It’s pretty apparent this is not going to be one of my more successful brews. There’s very little hops in evidence for an IPA and the malt and yeast flavours are just not up to scratch either. There’s enough bitterness surprisingly, but not enough hop flavour.

10/11/2013 – I had thought this was improving slightly – the Belgian yeast character was starting to subside somewhat though it still had (and has) a touch of the “heads and tails” about it. I’d three bottles of it recently, and the ensuing headache was something else. On this tasting, there’s an unpleasant level of residual sweetness in it. Even though there’s still plenty of hop bitterness there, perhaps it just doesn’t have the oomph to balance all that residual sugar? Not bad though, considering the brew day was an unmitigated disaster. You’d still know this was an American ale.