I've tried to do an "Imperial" IPA - basically an extra strength IPA without much extra body, acting as a showcase for the hops. I think my hop choices are a bit off though (Ideally I would have used Us type "C" hops for bittering, but Northdowns should be OK).....but anyway, it should be plenty drinkable. Might take a while to condition properly though!
Here's the recipe I used:
Fermentables
7.5Kg Pale Malt
400g Crystal
400g Wheat Malt
500g pale Belgian Candi Sugar
Hops
100g Northdowns 90 min 8.4%, 68.5 IBU
70g Aurora Super Styrians 30 min 5.8% 23.8 IBU
45g Cascade 7.1% 12.1 IBU
38g Amarillo 9.6% 1.2 IBU
For a total of 105.6 IBU!!!
Yeast
2l starter from Wyeast 1332 Northeast Ale
I didn't take as many pics as normal 'cos I'm feeling shite!
Here's the pr0n:
Grain bill ready to go - plus the Candi Sugar
Mash temp - went from here to 65.6 over 90 minutes
First runnings
First hops in. That's 100g of Northdowns there!
The rest of the hops - using up some open bags of Aurora, Cascade and Amarillo. Wish I had some more of the last two...
Chiller into the big pot of hop soup.
Running off into the FV - this took 45 minutes. There was alot of vegetable material there that caused a slow runoff
Here's the post boil wort. OG 1074 - I was aiming for 1080....so I don't know where the additional points went. Maybe I should have boiled it for longer, but this should still end up with an ABV of 8%+ which will be plenty good enough!
Yeast starter ready to pitch. That's a 2l flask. It was full, but I turned off the stir plate this morning as it had fermented out and let the yeast settle. Then I tipped out the extract starter beer and added some of the chilled new wort to the yeast slurry and bunged it back on the stir plate for an hour. As you can see - it got active very quickly!
Here's the aerated pitched wort ready to go. Into the wife's utility room at a good steady 24C.
Finally, the trub left over.....there's a lot of it.
A taster of this is pretty good. Although it is extremely bitter - what do you expect with a quarter of a kilo of hops in 5 gallons though...
As a side question......who knows a good place to get American hops from? I want to get Amarillo, Cascade, Chinook, Galaxy etc.. at a good price and as fresh as possible. Barley Bottom don't seem to do US hops, H&G do, but they are quite expensive, and my local brewery only have Fuggles and Goldings.
I think I'm going to change the meaning of "IPA" to "Intergalactic Pale Ale" in this case. There's enough hops in there to keep it fresh all the way to Andromeda, let alone India.
. It tasted almost Belgian in maltiness but with a huge orangey hop burst. Still too young though and needed the dry hops. It also needed cooling and carbonating. It's at 10C and 20psi now though.