Monday, October 25, 2010

Homegrown Hop IPA Brewday Update - Updated

This is kind of odd, I have not had a fermentation like this yet, here is the deal. As you can see in the video below the fermentation was really active and some krausen had formed. The video is about 14 hours into fermentation and I pitched on Saturday night. I went and checked it yesterday morning (10/26) and the krausen had already fallen. So I sat there and scratched my head as I usually have fairly long fermentation's and the krausen takes a while to fall for the majority of my beers. Also this was a fairly high starting gravity so I was really surprised. So I sanitized the thief and pulled a sample and took a gravity reading and this beer went from 1.075 to 1.025 in about 60 hours! Whoa! I am using two strains of yeast in this thing and I don't have any experience with either strain. I used Notty and WLP051.  I think the Notty took off early and then the WLP051 took over as I could definitely tell the difference in smell from the first time I checked it and how it smells this morning. Since I mashed high I am thinking that this beer is almost done, I am expecting it to finish around 1.020 - 1.015 so five to ten more points to go. I will leave it in primary and rack to secondary this weekend and start the dry hopping. Another thing that I found interesting is that when I tasted the sample of the cooled wort right after the brew session it tasted really super sweet, not a huge suprise but I thought that I would get more out of the 2oz FWH with the homegrown magnums. I did not get any bitterness in the first tasting. When I tasted it yesterday I defiantly got the bitterness, not quite as bitter as I wanted, but still enough to balance out the amount of sugars form the grist. I still have my fingers crossed but I think that this beer will turn out just fine! It tastes a little hot from the fast fermentation but it is not bad and it should mellow fairly quickly. Be on the lookout for more updates soon! Cheers.

P.S. Also congrats to Dank Brewer on getting his single tier set-up up and going! Cannot wait to see that thing in action!

SO the homegrown hop ipa is brewed up and happly fermenting. The post below has all the details, I will just tell you that brew day went extremely poorly, I started late and was rushed, but I know that I will end up with beer so it should be alright. My gravity is nice at 1.075ish and it is really sweet wort. I mashed a little high so there should be some nice sugars left over. The homegrown magnums did not get the bitterness that I was looking for but I will let you know how it turned out in about a month. Below is a pic of the sweet wort out of the kettle and a video of fermentation. Cheers!


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