Historical India Pale Ale (Export)

[Aleman]

I will admit first off that this is a style that I have never been particularly interested in brewing, mainly because the commercial examples of 'IPAs' are so bland and poor. If you consider teh tales of the APA (American Pale Ales) then incredibly bitter beers drunk young, Ueech! However somebody gave me the Durdenn Park book 'Old English Beers and how to make them' and having read that, I have been persuaded to alter my stance and reconsider. I must say that this is NOT an attempt to brew a particular beer of the period, but a beer in the style of . . .

First off the grain bill, I would expect an IPA to be an almost pure pale malt grist, and indeed looking at OBBAHTT that is the case. However I intend to mash this quite low (for me) to get a fermentable wort, but I do not wat to sacrifce malt flavour, so a small proportion (4%) of light crystal will be used. The real malt that is out of place is the Munich, I have included this as I feel that is its very close to the Mild malts of the day, possibly much more so that current day Mild Malt, certainly in my mild brewing I get a better flavour using Munich that Mild malt. The Munich malt is there to provide some sweetness, and to boost the malt profile in the more fermentable wort. So to hit my desired OG of 1.080 I reckon I'll need about 12Kg of malt (So did promash )

10.0 Kg Pale Malt
1.5 Kg Munich Malt
0.5 Kg Light Crystal Malt

This lot is going to be mashed for 90 minutes (my standard mash time) at 64-65C and I will be using my RIMS setup. I'm going to treat my (very Soft) water with Gypsum, as I want to make sure that I'm going to bring out the bitterness of the hops. I also need to boost the Calcium so it will help there as well. As I'm not a fan of unbalanced beers I will also use some calcium chloride in the mash as well to make sure the malt profile is well represented (and another reason for including the Munich malt). I will sparge this to collect 60 odd litres of wort in the kettles, and following my usual practice I will be First Wort Hopping with the main batch of bittering hops. I find that the period of soaking the bittering hops in the concentrated wort at 75C for the duration of the sparge, provides a really nice mellow bitterness. I have decided not to follow Durden Park and use all goldings as brewers at the time would not have had access to one variety of hop, plus I want to use Target to reduce the hop load in the kettle. I'll then use a mixture of Goldings and Fuggle as later additions. I know traditional brewers only used the one addition, and in a long maturing beer like this it probably makes little difference, but its my usual practice so that is what I am going to follow.

100g Target (11% AA - FWH 120 Minute Boil)
100g Golding (4.75% AA - 60 Minute Boil)
50g Fuggle (5% AA - 60 Minute Boil)
50g Golding (4.75% AA - 45 Minute boil)

Murphy's protofloc is my kettle fining of choice and 1g will be added during the last 10-15 minutes of the boil.

My Target are compressed hops but the fuggles and goldings are loose hops from last year, Stored in the freezer much to the annoyance of She.

I had decided to brew this using Whitelabs Burton yeast (one I didn't have in my collection) so a fresh vial was purchased and coaxed into life in a 5L starter. I'll decant the waste starter and pitch a fresh wort following my usual practice (ala DFS) while the wort is chilling. I will also oxygenate the starter AND the wort during transfer to the fermenter ( I run my oxygen at around 2L per minute, which creates 3 or 4 volumes of foam for the volume of beer so a few ml of Murphys HD20P antifoam will be added to the fermenter before the wort is run in.

Fermentation will be conducted at 20C for as long as it lasts, If required I will skim the dirty yeast head and will rack to seconday when the head falls. It will remain in secondary for a couple of weeks before being racked to two sanitised, purged corny kegs, where it will sit . . . and sit . . . . and sit for 12-18 months. I have thought about protecting the beer from the changes in ambient temperature, but have decided against it as I won't have room in the beer freezer, as I have 3 cornii worth of CAP (With an NZ Twist) to fill it for the next brew.

Any questions / observations please feel free to ask. I may not be able to answer them, but I'll have fun trying

[steve_flack]

Not sure about the Target myself - I'd use a different high alpha personally.

[Aleman]

Steve, Know what you mean about the Target, its not a hop I enjoy in normal beers, but because this one is so 'big', will be aged for so long, and the Target are going to be boiled for such a long time I suspect it will work. I once did a big no sparge beer (1.102 IIRC) which used Target as the bittering hop and it was excellent. The Table beer (1042 IIRC) I did from the second runnings, also used target, and that was not a very palatable beer at all, but it certainly aged well.

Interesting idea there Daab, I've not read anything like that before, but I would have thought that it would have been the direct fired coppers that were responsible for the wort darkening. I guess that there could be some sort of chemical reaction with the copper oxide dissolved by the acidic wort, but there have been studies that show that yeast absorb copper so its going to be some sort of oxidative reaction during the boil . . . Copper can act as a catalyst in some reactions (including with peracetic, which is why you don't use it on copper), so perhaps there is a more effective melanoidin reaction in the presence of copper?

I was thinking of having the local Hot water cylinder makers make me a copper 'copper' the only problem we had at the time was that the furnace heaters are more than a bit too fierce for the gauge copper they use So I've missed the opportunity to try that trick

[Vossy1]

Surely you're not implying we could learn something from our U.S cousins

[Aleman]

Shame about the copper 'copper', you'd have been for ever polishing it though

No, one use for spent malt is in cleaning copper, the mild acid brings copper up nicely

I found the source btw regarding copper/wort rection.

The brewers of the 19th century, however, used copper kettles that catalyzed browning reactions. Therefore we can safely conclude that IPAs were amber- to copper-colored ales, not pale or golden ales.

I guessed lucky then Increased Melanoidin reaction. Ok I need to throw some old copper into the coppers on Tuesday I'm building some IC's that will sit in the copper during the boil so that might help.

I do know that some breweries that moved over from copper to stainless had a lot of problems after the change and they were solved by throwing in a qty of old copper into the boil.