Traditional IPA

[mysterio]

Steve,

Do you leave the dry hops in for the full 12 - 18 months? I've never done it for that long but I'd be worried about some odd flavours. Is it only 90 minute hops & dry hops with no late hopping?

[Andy]

Try it...it's great.
..
..
Go ahead, you never know what might happen! Try their Porter too. Very nice.

Ah, it was the Meantime you were talking about on Tues, gotcha. Will get a bottle of IPA and their Porter in this w/e.

[SteveD]

Steve,

Do you leave the dry hops in for the full 12 - 18 months? I've never done it for that long but I'd be worried about some odd flavours. Is it only 90 minute hops & dry hops with no late hopping?

That thought occurred to me too and I need to ask James about that, as I haven't done it yet either. Tasting his though has made me determined to brew it. I suspect they're left in but I will check and let you know in a bit.

Yep, it's 90 mins copper hops then dry hops, no late/steeping/hopback, etc

[mysterio]

Cool, I think i'll try brewing it too.

[onlooker]

Re Sugar

Yep fair call, I added sugar as

1 Im an advocate of using sugar in beer , German Purity myths seem to have permeated the homebrew community ,

and

2 to go any higher in gravity than 1060ish I have to mash twice (which is actually a very traditional english way of mashing a high gravity ale) and when I do that my beers seem to not dry out, not a bad thing for an Imperial Stout or a Stock ale , but kind of out of place for an IPA.

My hop quantitys are hardly up to traditional recipe standards either.
Also I fly sparged , at the time a Scotish practise, I should have batch sparged.

[steve_flack]

2 to go any higher in gravity than 1060ish I have to mash twice (which is actually a very traditional english way of mashing a high gravity ale) and when I do that my beers seem to not dry out, not a bad thing for an Imperial Stout or a Stock ale , but kind of out of place for an IPA.

You could have parti-gyled which is traditional too. You could have made a strong beer with the first runnings (no sparge) then batch sparged to get smaller beers. Admittedly you wouldn't get a full brew length of the whopper.

[onlooker]

Yeah, if you check out the link to my introduction at the start to this thread you will see that I parti-gyle brew my ordinary and best bitters.

[BitterTed]

Oh my!! All I can say is that you kids have me changing my brewing schedule and preparing to make an IPA!! Now, do I make a traditional IPA as described in this thread, or do I make a hop monster like is so popular here in the States!! Decisions, decisions!!

[SteveD]

Re Sugar

Im an advocate of using sugar in beer , German Purity myths seem to have permeated the homebrew community.

Also I fly sparged , at the time a Scotish practise, I should have batch sparged.

Well, it's a personal choice, the sugar thing. I perfer not to add it, but it's not because of that daft bit of protectionism that the Germans hang on to. The Germans bang on about purity, but it's bollocks really. 'Pure' does not neccessarily mean 'better'. I'm a traditionalist I suppose. Original IPA didn't have it in, so I don't put it in. In don't add it to other styles either and prefer to regulate body using recipe, mash, and fermentation parameters, and have some more flavour instead.

Sparging was originally Scottish practice, true, but there are contemporary accounts of sparging in England years before the Scots started doing it..........
What the Scots did was build rotating sparge arms to do it more easily and perhaps more efficiently. By the time IPA was popular the English were commonly sparging too.

[SteveD]

Oh my!! All I can say is that you kids have me changing my brewing schedule and preparing to make an IPA!! Now, do I make a traditional IPA as described in this thread, or do I make a hop monster like is so popular here in the States!! Decisions, decisions!!

You don't get more of a hop monster than a traditional IPA...

Boil with goldings at the rate of 2.5oz per gallon. Yes...2.5oz per gallon, for 90 mins. Cool, strain off, rinse hops, ferment with good quality ale yeast. Dry hop with 1/2 oz goldings per 5 uk gallons. Mature 12-18 months.

Mind you if you do make one there will be plenty of time for the hop bitterness to mellow during the 18month maturation period and the sweaty sea voyage from London docks to India

Re Hop Monster....some of the recipes for Original IPA were even hoppier than James's 12.5oz per 5 gal recipe

OG 1065 - 15oz goldings alpha 4.5 /5 UK gal

Here's the most extreme beer recipe I've seen. Early Victorian..

OG: Unknown

for 5UK Gallons :- 50.2lb pale malt, 13oz 5% Goldings + 2.2 oz dry hops
for 25L :- 24.8kg, 400g hops + 66g dry

24.8KG! ..........hell, just chuck the whole sack in!

Apparently three beers were made from from three mashes. The first apparently kept for 8-10 years, the weaker 2nd mash beer was thought to be coming off at 1060...

Journey to India?? You're trying to get rid of me, aren't you!

[onlooker]

What the Scots did was build rotating sparge arms to do it more easily and perhaps more efficiently. By the time IPA was popular the English were commonly sparging too.

We would today refer to sparging or fly sparging as the sprinkling of hot liquor over the mash to rinse the extract from the grain, this act is very closly linked to the invention of the sparge arm.
Multiple mashing or what we would refer today to as multiple batch sparging, the act of allowing the runnings to drain off the mash , and then mixing (the original meaning of mash) hot liqour and grain and allowing the runnings to run off again was the "approved method of brewing in England up untill the 1870's" (La Pensee, 2001).

As for sugar I find it seems to help ester production, I seem to get a much fruityer yeast character when sugar is used. Just personal perception, I have no evidence for it.

[SteveD]

What the Scots did was build rotating sparge arms to do it more easily and perhaps more efficiently. By the time IPA was popular the English were commonly sparging too.

We would today refer to sparging or fly sparging as the sprinkling of hot liquor over the mash to rinse the extract from the grain, this act is very closly linked to the invention of the sparge arm.
Multiple mashing or what we would refer today to as multiple batch sparging, the act of allowing the runnings to drain off the mash , and then mixing (the original meaning of mash) hot liqour and grain and allowing the runnings to run off again was the "approved method of brewing in England up untill the 1870's" (La Pensee, 2001).

As for sugar I find it seems to help ester production, I seem to get a much fruityer yeast character when sugar is used. Just personal perception, I have no evidence for it.

Well, IPA was popular in the 1870's I've got the same book, forgot about that bit!

Interesting about the sugar. Hard to say wether the ester production is increased directly as a result of the sugar, or wether the sugar dilutes the malt flavour and thus makes the esters more obvious - if it were a low flavour type of sugar.

[BitterTed]

You don't get more of a hop monster than a traditional IPA...


Re Hop Monster....some of the recipes for Original IPA were even hoppier than James's 12.5oz per 5 gal recipe

OG 1065 - 15oz goldings alpha 4.5 /5 UK gal

Here's the most extreme beer recipe I've seen. Early Victorian..

OG: Unknown

for 5UK Gallons :- 50.2lb pale malt, 13oz 5% Goldings + 2.2 oz dry hops
for 25L :- 24.8kg, 400g hops + 66g dry

24.8KG! ..........hell, just chuck the whole sack in!

Apparently three beers were made from from three mashes. The first apparently kept for 8-10 years, the weaker 2nd mash beer was thought to be coming off at 1060...

Journey to India?? You're trying to get rid of me, aren't you!

Ahh yes DaaB, traditional IPA does have a lot of hops, but when you compare the AA of the hops today and the assumption that the AA was lower in hops back when the traditional brews were made, then one would assume the IBU of todays would be higher. Now mind you, these are all assumptions that I am going on. Either way, they are all "hop monsters" so I do stand corrected. I will say that the beer I was thinking of when I said hop monster, has 12.75 oz of hops, most are high alpha, then another 3.75 oz for dry hopping, totaling 16 oz in all. Not bad for a modern brew, eh!!

[BigEd]

the winner of the Great British Beer Festival last year used Brewers Gold (actually that's a German hop)

Sorry but I have to call you on this one. Brewer's Gold is now grown commercially only in Germany but it was developed in the early 1930s in the UK. It's still a great hop IMO although it has been supplanted by newer high-alpha varieties over the years. I will be adding a generous amount of Brewer's Gold to my IPA tomorrow.

[BigEd]

Hi Im new to this board , heres a link to my guestbook entry with a little bit about myself. http://jimsbeerkit.co.uk/forum/viewtopi ... 5806#35806

I thought I would share the recipe I brewed today.

Chilka IPA (19litre batch)

Grist
6kg Golden Promise

Adjunct:
500gs brown sugar

Hops://

47g Super Alpha (60 min)
40g Goldings (20min)
40g Goldings (10min)
40g Cascade (5min)
40g Styrian Goldings (1min)

Yeast Saf s-04

Step infusion at 60c, and at 67c.

o.g. 1072 .

Welcome, onlooker! That is a tasty looking brew. I have what I called a "historically inspired" IPA in secondary right now. I used brown sugar too at a similar rate and mixed the pale malt 90/10% with flaked barley to simulate the effect of less than modern maltings. For hops I went with Challenger and Goldings. I used the Challengers for early additions to save from using double the quantity of Goldings. While not strictly accurate to tradition I'm hoping this beer will have some of the possible flavor profiles of the original IPAs. These old style IPAs do need a long time to mature. This one was brewed in the middle of November and has been in secondary for 12 weeks. It's not bad but is still somewhat green. I think I will probably give it another couple of weeks in secondary and then keg it.

Quasi-Historical IPA (sorry boys this one is in lbs/oz)

10 US Gallons

19 lbs Pale malt (Munton's Pearl)
2 lbs flaked barley
.5 lb CaraFoam
2 lbs brown sugar

90 min hops: 3 oz Challenger
60 min hops: 3 oz Challenger
45 min hops: 2 oz Challenger
30 min hops: 4 oz Kent Goldings
15 min hops: 2 oz Kent Goldings
5 min hops: 2 oz Kent Goldings

Wyeast 1028 London Ale yeast