Random Ass Wit

I had some extra DME laying around from batches that might need some gravity adjustments as well as some extra hops and a good half-day back in April to Brew so ... why not.  Extract beer can feel like cheating, well it is cheating, but in the end there is a keg of homebrew so sometimes the ends do justify the means.

Went to the LHBS and found 3 lbs of Briess Wheat DME on sale which steered the remaining style toward a wheat.  A White Labs distriburer happened to be stocking WLP400 Belgian Wit which would work nicely with half wheat/half light DME.  I picked up some flaked wheat as a specialty grain for steeping to attempt to get some of the wit color and haze to the beer:  this failed.  Also used flaked Oats for some mouthfeel (Extract beers sometimes are just thin) and some Belgian Cara Vienna Malt for color/flavor.

Brewday went great.  I left the beer in Secondary longer than needed.  This was partially laziness and partially eexperimental.  I wanted to test having a beer in Secondary for longer periods of time.  The beer tasted well, a bit too hoppy but it mellowed out after a couple months.  I bottled nine 12 oz bottles for fun and the rest went slowly one half pint at a time from a corny keg.  There is probably three pints left in the keg at the time of this writing.

Recipe

Black Magic Black IPA

Black IPA, Cascadian Ale ... We are not getting into the naming controversy here.  We are summing up the 2012 Big Beer Bash Homebrew Competition sponsored by the KGB, a local beer club, hosted by St. Arnold's Brewery.  We've been entering this competition the past few years and always have had a good time.  The style for this year's competition was Black IPA and a big beer was brewed for it.  To get the recipe I shamelessly based the design on Stone Sublimely Self Righteous Ale as this is probably the best example of this style out there.  I surfed the net a bit and combined a bunch of ideas for the recipe.  One issue, strictly speaking, is that SSSRA is an imperial Black IPA which is not exactly to the competition style but I didn't really see that as an issue at the time.

Recipe:

In addition to the base grains a half lb of Carafe III was soaked in cold water for an hour and added to the wort upon temperature rise to boil. This was a 10 gallon batchsize.

Single Infusion @ 154-156 F was used.  I can't find the brew notes on sparge water a at the moment but will post when I dig them up.  One thing I can remember well was not placing the pelletized hops in the bag, but rather, putting them in the pot.  These hops never settled in primary, secondary, or the keg clogging the corney keg lines which was quite frustrating.  3 oz of dry hop pellets didn't help this either.  Next time I dry hop I'll get/order whole hops.  Anyway more details when I get the notes.  One thing that I would do for these Black IPA's is use some crushed Carafa III in a packed bed flowing the mash tun runnings through to extract excess tannins.  At least I saw a cool youtube video which tried that and I have a feeling that technique would work well.

The beer aged well and was well received.  The beer scored a 30/50 ... reaching the "Very Good" range which was not too bad for the 2nd beer brewed since the big Move.  I have a feeling that a few more months of aging will help the beer nicely mellowing out some of the astringent tones and some of the warmer alcohol mouthfeel.  Stay tuned for that!

Mid Year Catch Up

Whole Hog has been busy the past several months ... just not on the blog.  The next few posts serve as a catch up.