Knowing that Tim has a deep appreciation for quality beer, I was quite excited when he made a special request for an American IPA, perhaps something similar to Portland's Deschutes Brewery Red Chair IPA. I bought the Austin Homebrew recipe and got to work!
Once again, we doubled up, brewing again with Josh.
While I was boiling my American IPA, Josh was working on his first stout.
Check out the difference in color from Josh's stout (above) and my IPA (below)!
Much like my other post, here's another Vermeer into our brew day :-) Football on the TV, meat on the grill, two kettles on the boil with a smaller pot boiling our sparge water, an assortment of tools and supplies on the table, and essentially, a couple of pints of Pecan Porter freshly poured and beautifully heady!
Once again, we used dry ice to chill our wort in the utility sinks, and siphoned off the chilled wort down into our carboys. As you can see, brew day is a family affair :-)
About 12 hours later, my IPA was rocking and rolling, with lots of blowoff.
I would skip the second stage fermentation this time. I did add a full ounce of Cascade hops a week into fermentation (this is called dry hopping). This adds that huge, beautiful, fresh hoppy aroma to IPA beers.
Now the most unfortunate part about this whole brew is that I'm trying desperately to hold onto this beer until Tim and Linda get to Austin, but it's going very, very quickly! A couple of friends have already drawn a few growlers, and we had quite a few pints over Christmas. I did save one full growler (half gallon) for Tim, but I'm afraid that he probably won't get to enjoy this one straight from the tap head :-(
It was a little more cloudy than I had hoped (probably a bit of yeast still in solution). The original specific gravity was 1.064 and the final gravity was 1.021.
I'll definitely make this recipe again!
:-Dustin
