13 hop session IPA

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ianmatth

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I decided to use every hop I had again (partially to get rid of Bravo, Warrior, Millenium, and most of my Stella). I normally make DIPAs, so this time I decide to make a session IPA. For some reason I had horrible efficiency and my gravity was under 1.030, so I added a pound of sugar at the end to bring it up to 1.040

4 gallons:

6 lbs 2-row
6 oz CaraPils
6 oz C40
Mash at 145* for 60 min
Mash at 155-168* for 10 min
1/4 oz each CTZ, Apollo, Polaris, Bravo, Warrior, and Millenium @ 60
Whirlflock @ 20
1 oz mix of Citra, Simcoe, Centennial, El Dorado, Amarillo, Galaxy, and Stella @ 20, 15, 10, 5, 2
2 oz mix of Citra, Simcoe, Centennial, El Dorado, Amarillo, Galaxy, and Stella @ 0
30 minute hop stand
1 oz mix of Citra, Simcoe, Centennial, El Dorado, Amarillo, Galaxy, and Stella @ 180* Aroma Steep 30 min
1 lbs Cane sugar

OG is 1.040, and the IBUs calculate to 289, should be a hop monster of a session IPA. I pitched 140 billion cells of Conan.
 
I just read somewhere that once you get past 110 IBUs it doesn't really make much of a difference....
 
There is obviously something to going well past 110. Look at Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger. They are rated the #2 and #3 beers respectively, and their calculated IBUs go way past that. I'm sure there are diminishing returns, even just going past 60. I will admit that 289 IBUs is overkill for a 1.040 OG beer, but I didn't calculate the IBUs until after I made the beer, although I should have realized that 9.5 oz of hops in the boil would have been more appropriate for a 1.080 OG beer. It probably would have been a fine IPA with half as much hops, but I had about 4 oz of Stella that I wanted to use up, and I didn't want the flavor to be all Stella so I also had to use my top 6 late addition hops as well. This beer could have easily had even more hops if I hadn't used close to 7 oz in my one gallon Plinyfish Heady 120 QIPA giving it over 1200 IBUs. Yeah I used a pound of hops for 5 gallons of beer (and will probably use another 3 oz total for the dry hopping), but you only live once.
 
Gravity was down to 1.010. My beer still had a massive amount of krausen on top. I also left the hop bag that had the final 1 oz 180* aroma steep in so it had a strong grassy taste. From experience I know that should disappear by the time I transfer to secondary, dry hop, and bottle. However I could also really taste the fermented sugar so I decided to add 1.5 pound of DME to balance it out. I also added the yeast cake from my Plinyfish Heady 120 QIPA to make sure it had enough yeast to keep going strong. I've heard Sam Adams adds malt later in the fermentation, so I figured it couldn't hurt. That brought the gravity up to 1.025 (calculate 1.055 OG), so I guess I can't call it a session IPA anymore as it will probably finish at 1.005 and thus end up being 6.7% ABV.
 
Any reason you thought a 1.04 gravity beer wouldn't be able to finish with the yeast you had? Dumping a whole yeast cake in at the end of fermentation seems really bizarre to me.

I'm interested in how it turns out, but it doesn't sound like something I would like. Low mash+sugar added means almost nothing to balance the hop onslaught which was too big for such a small beer anyway. I would have added the DME instead of the sugar to begin with, and mashed high to have some malt to balance things a little.
 
With the added DME, the OG was really equivalent to 1.055 so I figured some extra yeast wouldn't hurt, and that yeast cake smelled too good to dump down the drain. I like really dry beers, but in retrospect I should have used DME up front instead of sugar. They're both in there now. This was kind of a thrown together beer in the first place, really made to get rid of some cheap 2-row and Stella hops that I didn't want to use in my more well thought out beers.
 
Gravity was down to 1.006, so I transferred to a 3 gallon Better Bottle a few days ago and am dry hopping with a 3/4 oz pellet mix of 12 hops (I'm out of Warrior), 1/2 oz Citra leaf , 1/4 oz Centennial leaf, 1/8 oz Simcoe leaf, and 1/8 oz Amarillo leaf.
 
How so? I like dry hoppy beers. In fact, one of the best beers I ever made was a 1.050 OG/1.005 FG IPA with ~180 IBUs in the boil and dry hopped with 20g hops (Simcoe and Amarillo leaf) per gallon. Anyway, as far as this beer, it tasted a little grassy coming out of the primary, but from experience I know it will be fine by the time it is done. Dry hopping contributes most of the flavor to IPAs anyway, so I'll see where it's at in a week. I might even decide to rack into another 3 gallon better bottle and do a double or even triple dry hop with about an oz each time for 3-5 days.
 
Subscribed.

You're a mad man! And I like it! Haha

Very interested in hearing how this turns out. I'm not sure I've ever came across a beer with nearly that high of IBU's (no Russian River in Michigan :( )
 
ianmatth said:
How so? I like dry hoppy beers. In fact, one of the best beers I ever made was a 1.050 OG/1.005 FG IPA with ~180 IBUs in the boil and dry hopped with 20g hops (Simcoe and Amarillo leaf) per gallon. Anyway, as far as this beer, it tasted a little grassy coming out of the primary, but from experience I know it will be fine by the time it is done. Dry hopping contributes most of the flavor to IPAs anyway, so I'll see where it's at in a week. I might even decide to rack into another 3 gallon better bottle and do a double or even triple dry hop with about an oz each time for 3-5 days.
Click to expand...


I wasn't trying to be a jerk, and you may make a beer that you would drink. Based on my experience there are a few things you are doing that just plain don't work:

Using more than a handful of hops, more hop varieties is not better

Using a maltbill with too few unfermentable sugars, in a very small beer...and not only that but also adding sugar.

Mashing extremely low(bad for small beers)

Using a highly attenuative yeast, as opposed to a low attenuating yeast(again in a small beer). Basically the last three points are providing you with a beer that is too dry and lacks any body.

Slamming a low gravity beer with over the top IBU's. Balancing FG sugars with IBU's is the name of the game for hoppy beers. Everyones taste as to what is balanced is different, but 100+(above human abilities of taste) at a FG of 1006, is ludicrous.


Hopefully you enjoy the results, but for me they would be undrinkable.
 
Big disagree on the hops. I will admit that the hops were over the top and certainly not the most efficient use of hops, but I've done beers with 17 hops, and as long as all the hops are good it doesn't matter if there are 100 of them. A lot of these hops really aren't that different anyway, but interestingly enough I find that mixing certain hops seem to give a better taste than the individual hops on their own. I have about 7 go to IPA hops and they definitely work well together (everyone knows about Simcoe/Amarillo, but Citra/El Dorado is also better than the sum of it's parts, Centennial works well with all of those, and while CTZ is so so and Apollo sucks as late addition/dry hops on their own, they work very well mixed with those other 5, and of course they're awesome for bittering.) As I said in my first post sometimes I'm just trying to get rid of hops that are fine hops but are not on my go to list. I've done that with hops like Cascade, Mosaic, Calypso, Falconers Flight, Zythos, Sorachi Ace, Kent Goldings, and various southern hemisphere hops in the past. I've even made some great beers with hops that I don't like by hiding them in the hops bill with the 45 and 30 minutes additions.

I've made great beers using nothing but 2-row, but I agree that the sugar was a bad idea. As far as mashing low, I think I already mentioned how I like dry beers. The only beer I ever made that I thought was too dry was a 1.088 OG/1.002 FG DIPA that got smashed by the accidental addition of a WLP099 starter beer I used to top off the secondary, although I probably would have thought it was perfect if the FG was in the 1.005-1.010 range. It still was a great DIPA, everyone liked it and no one had any idea it was 11.75% ABV and dry as a bone.

This certainly won't be my best beer, but I think it will be fine. I think this beer would have been better with about another 2 lbs of 2-row, a few more oz of Carapils, no sugar, and 100-150 calculated IBUs (maybe not better, but I could have used 2-3 times less hops), but I stand by my mash temps, hop variety, and choice of yeast. IMO a good session IPA would need 60 IBUs minimum and at least 80% attenuation (although I might like 85-90% attenuation even better.) This beer is way over the top for that, but at 1.055 OG it certainly isn't a session IPA anymore, more like a hardcore IPA with in your face bitterness and massive hop flavor.
 
Came in EXTREMELY dry at 1.003 after the first dry hop. Doing a 2nd dry hop with 1/2 oz Citra, 1/4 Centennial, 1/8 oz Simcoe, 1/8 oz Amarillo leaf. Added some DME, which would take OG to 1.060, but if the yeast is still pretty active that may not do much for my FG since I got 92.5% attenuation from the malt. I'd like to get my FG in the 1.005-1.008 range, so if that doesn't work I might try adding honey or mashing a little bit of a malt that doesn't attenuate well and adding that.
 
Adding honey will dry the beer out (honey basically=sugar). You can steep crystal or mash something at 160, but I'm not sure it will do a whole lot for you at this point.
 
The only reason I figured honey might help is because I heard it doesn't convert nearly as quick as sucrose, but I nixed that idea because it will eventually attenuate and would probably result in bottle bombs. I have some C40, so I might try mashing some at 160 and adding that, but I might just deal with the dryness and take it as a lesson to mash sub-1.060 OG batches at a higher temp in the future.
 
My beer tasted a lot better after a week of dry hopping, but the gravity came back down to 1.003. I added 1 oz of Citra leaf hops for the second and final dry hop. I mashed ~10 oz C40 at 156* for 60 min, sparged twice at 170*, boiled for 15 minutes, cooled down, and added it to my beer. Even sparging twice, it was so thick I couldn't measure the gravity. I added to my beer so we'll see what that does to my final gravity.
 
adding more dme each time you dry hop is likely to be counter productive; blowing off the aromatics you are trying to trap.
 
with all due respect, this sounds like a total trainwreck. I suppose I can understand just wanting to get rid of your excess hops. But I would have rather just made a couple different 1gal batches and dry-hopped them with massive amounts of pairs or trios of hops instead of just slamming them all in a single beer.

With Citra, Simcoe, Centennial, El Dorado, Amarillo, Galaxy, and Stella as flavor hops and aroma hops, I think it's safe to say the only real flavor or aroma you are going to get is "muddled hops" They'll all just lose the qualities that make them distinct varieties.

When you combine that with massively overpitching and kicking up a bit more fermentation of the C40, blowing off the aromatics you're looking for as the above poster said, I'm not real sure what it is you're going for here. It will certainly be bitter, and probably in the area of a session abv, but I can't say it sounds like a work of art. Either way, I hope you enjoy your batch.
 
tagz - I think I had enough hop aroma I could let some go. I'm doing a 2nd dry hop and only the C40 will be fermenting during that. I can always do a 3rd dry hop if I feel it needs it. :D

neosapien - I've done the Citra, Simcoe, Centennial, El Dorado, Amarillo, Galaxy thing before, tastes great. And I'm not sure how 140 billion cells in a 4 gallon batch that now has an OG that calculates to 1.060 is overpitching. We'll see what the C40 does, as I said I think I have enough flavor and aroma in there, but I can always do another dry hop if I think I need to. I think I already mentioned how I should have mashed with 2 lbs more 2-row at a higher temp and not added sugar, but the beer already tastes fine after the first dry hop - even at 1.003 gravity - so I assume it will improve unless the C40 makes it funky. I also have my Heady clone in secondary, so I've got plenty of good stuff on the way.
 
neosapien said:
with all due respect, this sounds like a total trainwreck. I suppose I can understand just wanting to get rid of your excess hops. But I would have rather just made a couple different 1gal batches and dry-hopped them with massive amounts of pairs or trios of hops instead of just slamming them all in a single beer.

With Citra, Simcoe, Centennial, El Dorado, Amarillo, Galaxy, and Stella as flavor hops and aroma hops, I think it's safe to say the only real flavor or aroma you are going to get is "muddled hops" They'll all just lose the qualities that make them distinct varieties.

When you combine that with massively overpitching and kicking up a bit more fermentation of the C40, blowing off the aromatics you're looking for as the above poster said, I'm not real sure what it is you're going for here. It will certainly be bitter, and probably in the area of a session abv, but I can't say it sounds like a work of art. Either way, I hope you enjoy your batch.
Click to expand...

Agree on all counts
 
My only commercial experience with high IBU low gravity beer is Drake's Alpha Session, which I hated. To me it's the poster child for "your malt bill should match your hops."
 
I have a feeling people aren't reading the full thread. OG now calculates to 1.060, NOT a session ale by any means. I also don't know why anyone thinks 140 billion cells is over-pitching? Can anyone explain that?

Finally, I will agree that I made some mistakes with the malt/sugar and the AMOUNT of hops was overkill, but I will again DISAGREE with the critique of my hop selection.

Now it may be a matter of taste (I like fruit bomb IPAs rather than IPAs that are balanced between fruity and dank hops), but I have done EXTENSIVE experimenting with different combinations of hops. Everyone knows Simcoe, Amarillo, and Centennial go together...and Citra, El Dorado, and Galaxy are very similar to Amarillo and Centennial. IMO Centennial, Citra, and El Dorado work better with Simcoe than Amarillo...which is a standard in the industry for balancing out Simcoe. Citra/El Dorado is my favorite hop combination, definitely better than the sum of it's parts. So if all the best IPAs are using Simcoe, Amarillo, and Centennial, how are Citra and El Dorado going to mess that up? Do some experiments and see for yourself.
 
you pitched an entire yeast cake (from already worn-out quad IPA, nonetheless) on a beer that already had a high attenuating yeast in it with a current gravity reading of 1.010. that amount of yeast on a relatively small amount of available sugars, even with the DME addition, sounds a bit like overpitching to me...maybe i'm wrong.
 
I feel like an idiot now, I guess you read my thread a little better than I did, I've got so many beers going I forgot about that. Yeah, I over-pitched too...even though it wasn't that big of a yeast cake. No wonder gravity came down to 1.003. I still liked it better than a lot of 80+ rated IPAs after the first dry hop. Not my greatest beer...and might be my worst IPA, but I'll enjoy it, and since no one who I'm going to give it to makes great beer they'll probably like it too. I guess the only thing I did right with this beer was my hop selection. :D
 
hey man, it's your beer. if you like it, then i'd say you've had a success. just because some of us wouldn't do it the same way doesn't mean you're doing it wrong.
 
The C40 got smashed right back down to 1.003, I feel like the only thing it did was make the beer darker. I have one last trick up my sleeve with this beer. I had a pretty significant amount of stepped on oak chips (been through 2-3 different kinds of alcohol already), so I figured that since this beer had been pretty stepped on, it couldn't hurt to add them in.
 
might try boiling up some maltodextrin and adding that if you want to bump up the body.
 
I think I'm just going to deal with a dry beer. It was fine after the first dry hop, but has really turned into an experiment at this point (not that all the screwing around with sugar, yeast, and DME wasn't). I'm considering doing a final dry hop w/ 1/4 oz each of Citra, Simcoe, and Centennial to finish it off with something I know will give it good flavor, but I'm kind of getting sick of wasting time on this beer when I have a few others in the works that are much better.
 
I decided to dry hop one gallon with a 3rd dry hop of 1/8 oz Citra, and another one gallon with a 3rd dry hop of 1/8 oz combination of Citra, Centennial, and Simcoe. I bottled the remaining beer.
 
Bottled everything. The part I bottled last week is good, not my best, but I would probably give it a 3.25 out of 5. Took a taste of the part I used Citra, Centennial, and Simcoe for the 3rd dry hop and it tastes a little better. This will probably come out being a 3.5 beer, which is better than I thought it would with all the mistakes I made.
 
Wow guys way to rip into this guy. What a shame. Isn't home brewing supposed to be about trial and error... And maybe, just MAYBE getting crazy and doing something outside of the box? Y'all are boring and straight up rude. Anyways, I think your beer will suit you just fine. I do agree on most of the points everyone is making, but this beer serves it's purpose for exactly what you intended it to be.
 
Moerdertaktiken said:
Wow guys way to rip into this guy. What a shame. Isn't home brewing supposed to be about trial and error... And maybe, just MAYBE getting crazy and doing something outside of the box? Y'all are boring and straight up rude. Anyways, I think your beer will suit you just fine. I do agree on most of the points everyone is making, but this beer serves it's purpose for exactly what you intended it to be.
Click to expand...
Truth be told. I wouldn't do it just cause I couldn't afford to let all those hops go, but if someone is then more power to them. As long as you learn from the things that you do, there's nothing wrong with it :mug:
 
With the exception of a final 22 oz bottle, I have finished all this beer. It turned out A LOT better than I thought it would. One of the few IPAs that actually tastes better than it smells. Here is my official review:

A - 4.00: Light yellow-orange. I could care less about appearance, so unless it's really beautiful or really ugly, it will get the average of the other ratings. Who drinks a beer for appearance anyway?

S - 4.25: Great hop smell. Major fruit and pine.

T - 4.25: Tastes better than it smells. The triple dry hopping gives an incredible citrus taste that covers up the vast majority of the mistakes I made (bitterness, dryness, attenuated sugar).

M - 3.25: Very smooth and light for a 7.7% ABV beer, but extremely dry and lacking body.

O - 4.00: The dry hops saved this beer. I had this next to a Southern Tier 2XIPA IPA and it had so much more citrus hop flavor. Better than a lot of 4.00 rated IPAs IMO. Everyone who liked IPAs thought it was great. Proof that dry hopping the crap out of an IPA can overcome a lot of issues.
 
You bring up a constant issue that I have with most IPAs. The smell often exceeds the taste. I highly recommend checking out hop steeping. It seems to work very well
 
Thanks for seeing the thread through to completion! Glad you ended up with a beer you enjoyed out of it.

Cheers!
 

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