Modern Homebrew Recipes (16 page)

Water treatment:

RO water treated with ¼ tsp 10% phosphoric acid per 5 gallons

0.5 tsp CaCl
₂
and 0.5 tsp CaSO
₄
in mash

Mash technique:

Step Infusion

Mash rests:

144°F (62°C) 45 minutes

158°F (70°C) 15 minutes

Kettle volume:

8.5 gallons (32 L)

Boil length:

90 minutes

Final volume:

6.5 gallons (25 L)

Fermentation temp:

68°F (20°C)

Sensory Description:
Mosaic has a very complex profile that is fruity, citrusy, piney, and floral; it’s like a blend of hops bred into one variety. The beer is pale amber with orange highlights, very clear. Big fruity, piney, and fresh hop aroma. Clean fermentation profile. High bitterness, but no harshness due to the late hopping technique. Fruity, piney flavor, dry finish, medium body. Very easy drinking, especially considering the deceptive strength.

Formulation notes:
Mosaic is critical to this recipe, obviously. The base malt is supportive, but I use base malts to add complexity without crystal sweetness. Some sugar helps attenuation, and the Tupelo honey adds a little flavor as well. If you haven’t used Tupelo before, it’s a wonderful honey that can improve virtually any mead (or beer). I think the yeast selection adds some fruitiness as well. With the late steeping hops, the actual IBUs are likely higher than calculated.

Variations:
I would love to see someone try to recreate this beer without using Mosaic hops. I’d be very intrigued to see how many different hops would need to be blended to get this level of complexity. Since the beer is fairly simple, it could serve as a base for other double IPA experiments by adding some other color or character malts. I’d be afraid of stepping on the hops too much, so tread lightly with those additional grains. The other obvious alternative is to dry hop this beer; I’d start with 2 oz (57 g) of Mosaic pellets and see where it goes from there.

WEST COAST DOUBLE IPA

I love the beers from Firestone Walker (especially Pale 31 and Union Jack), probably because many of brewmaster Matt Brynildson’s ingredient preferences seem to match my own. While researching an article on dry hopping, I was intrigued by his short, successive hop technique and wanted to try it in a tribute to one of his beers, the Double Jack double IPA. He has talked about doing two successive dry hop additions, so I thought I’d give my version three. I’m using some of the hop choices he describes, but the recipe isn’t meant to be a clone, just a beer I’d hope Matt would like.

Style:
Double IPA (Classic BJCP Style)

Description:
A double IPA with a fairly clean and malty grain bill and aggressive hopping. The dry hops are applied in successive additions to get the most oils from the hops without extracting too much vegetal matter.

Ingredients:

Water treatment:

RO water treated with ¼ tsp 10% phosphoric acid per 5 gallons

0.5 tsp CaCl
₂
and 0.5 tsp CaSO
₄
in mash

Mash technique:

Infusion, mashout, crystal malt added at
vorlauf

Mash rests:

131°F (55°C) 15 minutes

145°F (63°C) 30 minutes

158°F (70°C) 10 minutes

170°F (77°C) 10 minutes

Kettle volume:

8.5 gallons (32 L)

Boil length:

90 minutes

Final volume:

6.5 gallons (25 L)

Fermentation temp:

64°F (18°C)

Sensory Description:
Strongly hoppy, with a citrus, pine, and fruity aroma and a malty, sweet backing. Clean fermentation profile with supportive esters that work well with the hops. The malt is mostly neutral with enough richness to support the strong bitterness. The dry finish is clean with lingering bitterness and a boatload of hops. The alcohol is noticeable, especially when young, but the hops carry the beer.

Formulation notes:
Combines a hop stand (20 minute post-boil steep) with a successive dry hop regimen.
*
Combine all the dry hops, then split into 3 equal portions; use each portion for a 3 day dry hopping period in succession at fermentation temperature, removing each addition of hops before adding the next. Be very careful to avoid oxygen pickup during this process. Crash cool when done. Does not include IBUs from the steeping, but we’re pushing the limit of solubility for iso-alpha acids in this recipe anyway.

Variations:
Any experimentation in this recipe is in the hop choices. Finding good combinations without producing a muddy result can be difficult. The base beer should provide a blank slate for creative hop use, whether a single hop beer or a combination.

¹
http://www.realbeer.com/hops/sister.html

4. EVERYDAY BEER RECIPES

“The way I see it, you should live everyday like it’s your birthday.”

—Paris Hilton, socialite

Sometimes I’m in the mood for aggressive beers. But just as often, I find that I’d just like to enjoy a pint or two without making a big deal of it. As a result, I brew easy drinking beers that I can enjoy while watching sports, or (to fit the American stereotype) after mowing the lawn. I hesitate to call these beers
session beers
, because I think that’s a narrow definition reserved for more classic English styles of lower gravity. I prefer to call these
everyday beers
, since they are the kind of beer you can drink basically any time you want, regardless of situation or weather.

I think the key characteristics of everyday beers are moderate alcohol level (around 5% ABV), with a good balance of malt and hops, flavors with more than one dimension, and (most importantly) an emphasis on drinkability. These styles aren’t tied to any particular country, they’re more a selection of worldwide beer styles that I like to drink regularly.

I’ve chosen multiple examples of some styles to demonstrate the range, how styles have changed, or to show how various techniques can be used to reach similar brewing goals.

•
Columbus Pale Ale
– A classic APA using mostly Columbus hops, this beer served as the prototype for most of my hoppy pale beers.

•
Galaxy Pale Ale
– A modern APA with New World hops. Uses Australian Galaxy hops exclusively, which gives the beer a big passion fruit character.

•
Classic Blonde Ale
– A versatile summer beer that has a malty finish and clean flavors.

•
West Coast Blonde
– A late-hopped session beer, more bitter than most blonde ales; a cousin to Session IPA.

•
New World Blonde
– A warm weather beer featuring tropical fruit flavors.

•
Ordinary Bitter
– There’s nothing ordinary about this beer. My Michael Jackson tribute beer is modeled after Fuller’s Chiswick Bitter.

•
Pride of Warwick Bitter
– Best bitter is one of my favorite English styles, and I made this one a bit more in the style of draught Bass ale.

•
English Pale Ale
– Don’t call it an ESB; that’s a specific brand name for a Fuller’s beer. I prefer strong bitter if served on draft, and pale ale if in bottles.

•
Landlord Tribute
– A great best bitter, this can be made as a Single Malt and Single Hop (SMaSH) beer if you want.

•
Export Irish Red Ale
– After I learned that authentic Irish red ales have a different character locally than what they export to the US, I decided that I liked both of them. Here is my take on the export version with more caramel character, strength, and sweetness.

•
Scottish Heavy
– Very adaptable, this beer can be easily scaled to different strengths.

•
Killer Kölsch
– Balance is the key in this delicate style from Cologne, Germany.

•
American Wheat Beer
– Summer in a glass (at least in the US Midwest), but I’ll drink this one year-round.

•
Nut Brown Ale
– A modern English brown ale to honor the very first beer style I ever brewed.

•
Honey Brown Ale
– Don’t look at me like that; it was a request for a party. This is a split batch recipe for both a plain brown ale and a honey brown.

•
American Amber Ale
– A complex grain bill that uses Belgian, German, and English specialty malts with a modern fruity hop character.

•
Atypical Altbier
– Misinformation leads to deliciousness in this style from Düsseldorf.

•
Classic Altbier
– No misinformation here; this recipe closely matches the best commercial examples when fresh.

COLUMBUS PALE ALE

This is the all-grain version of the first American Pale Ale recipe that I put together after my local DRAFT homebrew club made a bulk purchase of Tomahawk hops (Tomahawk, Columbus, and Zeus hops are collective referred to as CTZ since they are the same hop). It represents the classic, old-school type of strong pale ale that was quite common in the early days of craft brewing. It uses a variety of character malts with a traditional hopping regime. This beer won a number of medals, along with a best of show at the Riverside Rumble competition in Ohio in 1999.

Style:
American Pale Ale (Classic BJCP Style)

Description:
My brewing notes of the time said that this was “excellent, almost an IPA.” I was probably thinking along the lines of Anchor Liberty. Today I don’t think many people would confuse this with an IPA. It’s a strong pale ale.

Ingredients: