First Attempt At Homebrew: Belgian IPA

I wasn’t able to make it back up to Portland for the Holiday Ale Festival yesterday. Being stuck at home in Eugene, I decided to spend the evening brewing. First off, my experience with homebrewing until this point has consisted of brewing a single batch of beer in a Mr. Beer kit my wife bought me a couple years ago for Christmas. This also means that the whole of my homebrew equipment is said Mr. Beer kit. After doing some reading on the interwebs, I was confident I could do a small extract batch in my Mr. Beer fermenter.

I decided to brew a Belgian IPA, something like Stone’s Cali-Belgique. Stone’s website mentions that Cali-Belgique uses the same grain bill as Stone IPA, then ferments with a Belgian yeast. The only other difference I could find was that they omit Chinook hops from the boil, using them only for dry-hopping the Cali. I used the Recipe Calculator on Tastybrew.com to work out the right quantities needed for a 2 gallon batch that would keep the ABV and IBUs somewhere in the ballpark of Stone’s brew. I came up with the following recipe:

3.5 lb Light LME

8 oz CaraPils

8 oz American Crystal 40L

8 oz American Victory (The homebrew shop was out of Belgian Biscuit and suggested this as a substitute)

.25 oz Zeus (16% AA) @ 60 minutes

.25 oz Centennial (9% AA) @ 45 minutes

.25 oz Zeus (16% AA) @ 10 minutes

.25 oz Centennial (9% AA) @ 5 minutes

Wyeast 1388 Belgian Strong Ale

Boil Volume: 1 Gallon

Batch Size: 2.13 Gallons

OG: 1.064

FG: 1.016

ABV: 6.2%

IBU: 68

SRM: 11

The Victory malt was my own addition. I wanted my IPA to have a more “bready” flavor than the Cali and thought this would do the trick. With the recipe sorted, I picked up all my ingredients at the Home Fermenter Center and invited my hetero-brew-mate Jesse over to make some beer.

We started by steeping the grains in a half gallon of 155 degree (F) water for 30 minutes.

After steeping, we sparged the grains with enough 170 degree water to bring the volume of the boil pot to one gallon. We added the LME and brought everything to a boil.

Then we sat back and waited an hour; adding hops according to the schedule above.

When the boil was complete, our wort had reduced down to less than two quarts. We water bathed the pot to bring the temperature, strained the wort into the fermenter and added enough water to get up to two gallons.

This is where we ran into our our only problem of the night. The wort volume was so small that by the time we topped the fermenter off, the temperature was about 55 degrees; twenty degrees cooler than we wanted for pitching the yeast. A frantic search of the internet told us that this was ok; the yeast just wouldn’t do much until the temperature of the wort came up above 70 degrees. We waited until we were about 60 degrees, pitched the yeast and aerated like mad. Then the fermenter was wrapped in a towel and placed in my pantry.

When I got up this morning, it looked like the yeast was finally starting to get to work. There was a thin film over the entire surface. Right now, I ‘m 21 hours into fermentation and there is about a inch of krausen. The beer is also starting to smell great. I am picking up a lot of the Zeus hops when I open the pantry. I plan on leaving the beer in the fermenter for two weeks, then going straight to bottles for another two.

I think I’ve definitely been bitten by the homebrew bug. I am already trying to decide what to do for my second batch. I want to reuse the yeast cake from this batch, so I will probably do something like a Belgian Strong Ale. Jesse was talking about putting together a 5 gallon kit when he left last night.

I’ll write up another post in a couple weeks when I move my IPA to bottles.

Cheers!
Kevin