New England IPA

I generally don’t brew many IPAs. I don’t drink them enough for a batch to stay fresh in my keezer and there are many solid choices on the market here in Florida if I feel the need. I do occasion like to try out a IPA recipe for competition or special event brewing and that is why this NE IPA got brewed up. That and I had a ton of hops I wanted to clean out of the freezer.

This recipe is not my own. Normally when I find a recipe I am interested in brewing I tend to tweak it to varying degrees based on my preferences for the style or where I might think it would do better for competition. With this recipe though I went straight from the source which can be found on the homebrew talk forums Here. The recipe is by a brewer who goes by the name Braufessor. Seeing I have only tried a few NE ipas and because I wasn’t a huge fan them, or at least I didn’t understand all the fuss about them, I figured I should go with a tried and tested recipe.

I won’t include the recipe in this post as I have done nothing to it other than to adjust it for my system and you can get a fair amount of information from the link above.

Question: Why brew a beer style that you don’t necessarily like?

Answer: To win sweet swag!

My homebrew club had a couple events this past weekend we were invited to serve at, The Hogtown Craft Beer Festival and a all IPA competition sponsored by Aardwolf Brewing, Ballast Point, and a local bottleshop & taproom Alewife. Because, I enjoying brewing as much as drinking I volunteered a to brew for both events.

I find that tame yet interesting beers tend to go over well at these types of events and initially was planning on a light sour using crooked stave dregs for hogtown but that beer turned out great and my wife wouldn’t let it leave the house. So on back to back days I brewed a couple of ipas figuring the better would go to the competition and the other to the give away.

They both came out good and I decided the NE IPA would have a better go at a peoples choice award then the traditional american ipa due to it’s juicy, soft character. It turned out it was a good call and I won peoples and judges choice with the NE IPA a beer style that I still don’t care for.

If I were to brew this beer again I would likely go with a Chloride dominant water profile something in the 2:1 Cl:SO4 range. Maybe Cl 140ppm So4 70ppm I tried a relatively standard ipa water profile on this attempt per some advice on the forums and the mouthfeel was a little thin for the “style”.

One other note. Having never used whole cone hops before I found out pumps do not appreciate them… lesson learned

I assumed that the whole cone hops would sink when I tossed them in the fermenter. This was not the case however. In my initial charge of dry hops the mosaic and galaxy pellets went in first and the citra whole cones just kinda floated with the bottom soaking the top not so much. I will have to rethink that if I use them in such quantity again as Im sure it affected the beer.