Home Brew Forum

The Black Pig Brewery presents, in order to make some room in the freezer - it's full of hops... and make a dent in my grain mountain.

Spacemaker IPA

23L at OG1070

9kg Low Colour MO Pale Malt
304g fuggles & goldings, home grown - 90 mins
116g goldings gold foil pack - 90 mins
72g fuggles home grown - steep
48g goldings gold foil pack -steep
dry hops, probably 30-60g goldings

3 x Nottingham yeast

Pretty much a traditional IPA recipe - the qty of malt and copper hop rate is more or less Durden Park's 'Original IPA', but with James McCrorie's twist of a wodge of late hops as well as dry.

Mashed and batch sparged to get enough sugar for 38-39L preboil down to 27L OG1070 at switch off, as those hops were going to rob loads of wort. I thought I'd get about 20L in the FV. Hiccup - mash manifold came away from the connecting pipe. Had to drain mash into boiler and dig out enough grain to reattach the manifold, then put the grain back and refill the mash tun.

This is a bonkers brew - pics to illustrate the quantity of hops involved:-

Brewer's Acolyte modeling the copper hops - that's a 3.5 gallon fermenter.


Forcing that ammount of hops into wort was fun - had to beat them in with a paddle to make thick hop soup - hop porridge by the end of the boil.


Late hops


20L ran off at OG1071-1072, so the hops were sparged to get 23L at 1070. The aroma is fantastic and the wort is as bitter as my ex-wife, but with lovely flavour, so it bodes well. Needs to be kept a year at least. There were 25L of spent hops in the boiler afterwards - no wonder the Victorians re-used them

Going to brew another one soon with gold foil goldings.

ruddy hell steve - with all those hops and malt perhaps should be called pacemaker ....

Bigster wrote:ruddy hell steve - with all those hops and malt perhaps should be called pacemaker ....

Yeah, it's pretty extreme. Another name would be Walletburner, what with the price of hops and grain theses days. Still, all being well, it should mellow down into something that's worth the effort.

btw those hops look superb

Wow, that's a lot of hops

SteveD wrote:There were 25L of spent hops in the boiler afterwards

Jeez, thats more than the wort I produced on my last brew

And Steve how many months/years does this beer need to be laid down for?

Hoptastic! That's a crazy brew - top marks! Will you remember to give us tasting notes in 2009?

I shall look forward to tasting that in a years time (to see how it's coming along obviously).

Top banana Steve that gonna be a cracker

Excellent! How long are the dry hops staying in for?

That looks the business. Hoping to brew one of these big beers this year.

Matt

hmmmm

Just taken delivery of 2 kilos of fuggles . . . . Hop soup anyone?

Wow Steve....In your other brew series this might have been named

The Bishop's Nads

Oggy' Bar wrote:Wow Steve....In your other brew series this might have been named

The Bishop's Nads

Arse!! I'd temporarily forgotten about my clerical anatomy series!

To answer your questions - how long to mature depends on how much bitterness there is to mellow out, but at a guess drinkable at 9 months, best left 12-24 months.

Dry hops - I'm wondering about that myself. At a guess a couple of months then rack off into a fresh cornie, but, I think James McCrorie leaves them in for the duration as he talked of weighing down the hop muslin so that it sits near the dip tube uptake. That way when you draw off beer, your getting the hoppiest stuff each time. I'm going to ring him and ask the question.

The home growns do look nice, cheers, probably because they haven't been mangled by industrial process.