Saturday, April 7, 2012

Zythos IPA - brewing

I thought it was about time to make something hoppy. Over the last 6 months, I have been making malty, roasty or sour beers. With such a long break from hops, I wanted this one to be big. As I was putting the recipe together, I decided to focus more on the citrusy side of American hops, but I soon found out that all of the good ones are sold out until the next harvest (early fall). What I did find was the hop bled from hop union called Zythos. It is apparently a blend of quite a few American hops. I ordered a pound of this and worked 1/2 of that into this recipe. 6 ounces in the boil and 2 more for dry hopping. I needed a malt bill that can stand up to that much hop flavor.
I started with a base of standard 2 row, a pound of caramel 80 (I happened to have some I wanted to use up) another pound of cara-pils and a pound of sugar to top it off. The goal is an ~8% abv beer. Full recipe here. Also with 6oz hops in the kettle, you lose quit a bit of wort, so I planned this as a 6 gallon recipe and will hopefully end up with 5 in the keg.

For today, I wanted to keep it simple and focus just on this one beer. I didn't start the water or crushing the grains until after 9am and I had the chiller going in time to make it to the farmer's market by 12:30. For the most part, the day went smoothly although during the boil, there was some boil over, but strangely no wort escaped, it just pushed all of the hops out. I scooped them back in and kept the fire going. Everything looked like it was going well, but when I checked the gravity, it was much lower than expected. 1.061, which means I only got 60% efficiency. Depending on where it finishes, I may have a 6.5% beer. Not quite as big as I was hoping, but will still be OK.
My daughter really liked sampling the sweet wort. I may have to start making some non-alcoholic malt beverages.

I then used a half gallon of the final runnings to top off my sour cultures and set a couple out in an attempt to capture wild yeast. We will see how that goes...

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