Famous Last Words IIPA

[Richard]

To be brewed once various ingredients materialise from NG. Somewhat inspired by http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f69/tits-up ... ver-92914/

OG is about 1.085, FG will be more clear once I've tested the yeast on a small sample of similar gravity wort.

18.00 lb 2-row
01.00 lb cara-munich
01.00 lb 60L Crystal
01.50 lb inverted sucrose (i.e. glucose + fructose mix)

2.00 oz Northern Brewer [9.9%] (60 mins)
2.00 oz Zeus [15.5%] (60 mins)
3.00 oz Cascade [7.0%] (10 mins)
Dry hop:
2.00oz Cascade (for 10 days, after primary)

Yeast cultured from Garrisons IIPA (will force-test for attenuation at likely OG once harvested).

[Hawoh]

I'd be cautious of harvesting yeast from a high OG beer. The health/quality of that yeast would not likely be something you would want to propagate for reuse.

[Richard]

hawoh: I already managed to harvest Chimay yeast from 9.0%ABV... You just have to pay more attention to increasing the health of the yeast, as opposed to just growth, when stepping it up from the sample. De-stressing, essentially

[Richard]

I probably should differentiate a little between harvesting (re-using) and culturing (re-growing). The latter can turn unhealthy, stressed yeast into a healthy culture ready for re-use. The former is iffy at high OG because the culture is likely stressed/unhealthy.

[Kyle]

how about a Cascade addition at 1 min.

[Richard]

I figured last-minute would be drowned out by any dry-hopping.

[Richard]

Milling 20lbs by hand = half an hour's work. This better be worth the hassle

[Richard]

didn't have time to harvest the yeast, so I'm just gonna be using two packs of S-05 rehydrated.

[Richard]

Bah. Using a new mash tun + completely overshot my target temperature (ended up at 158F at the start, down to about 156 after an hour). Going for longer mashing time (2 hours) in the hope that there's still some beta-amylase left to cut up those sugars...
 :oops:

[Richard]

For those who haven't seen it, this is an awesome resource on single-infusion mashing:

http://braukaiser.com/wiki/index.php?ti ... on_mashing

[Richard]

My ghetto mash-tun ended in a stuck sparge, so I had to resort to my old method of pouring through a very large straining bag rather than just turning a tap. Probably picked up some HSA, but it's not affected the result too badly prior to now: I'm going to make this work one way or another!

[Richard]

Boiling away for 1 hour to bring down to a workable volume; 20 minutes into the additions boil. Adjusted the hops a little higher for bittering to cope with probable caramelisation (and finally admitted to myself that I'm a Cascade whore). Going to add the plain sugars once the fermentation slows (1-2 days probably).

This has so far been a bit of a learning exercise -- dealing with potentially fatal errors. This is my first high gravity AG beer, so I should probably just be thankful that I'm not cleaning up eight gallons of wort and tears from my kitchen floor.

[Kyle]

yeah, imperials are hard to do in any case, but if your stove lacks power, it takes forever. My recent IIPA took 2.5 hours to boil from 8.5 gallons to 5.5 gal. Its only a 7.5 gal pot, so I added fresh wort as room become available.

Thomas had success insulating his pot for a better boil, but I'm planning to use mine with gas over the summer, and need it to fit properly on the stand.

[Richard]

Yeah, my mash efficiency turned out to be about 60% - pretty bad. Next time I'll need to use a higher water-to-grist ratio to have any hope of increasing that efficiency, but the original inspiration (See first post) only planned for and achieved a 64% efficiency, so...

... anyways it's starting to bubble now, now comes the waiting game

[Richard]

This badboy smells amazing -- filling the whole kitchen with hop aroma. Pity that means it's escaping the actual beer, but I'll be jamming the aroma back in with some dry hopping in about 10 days.