After my trip to San Diego looking to brew a killer IPA

So after indulging in a week’s worth of IPA’s in San Diego I am inspired to make a great west coast style IPA. After researching various west coast IPA recipes here is what I came up with. Looking for some feedback.

Malt:
11lb Pale 2 row
0.5lb Munich malt
0.5lb C40
0.25lb CaraPils

Hops:
0.75oz Simcoe (60 min)
0.5oz each Simcoe, Amarillo (30 min)
0.5oz each Cascade, Simcoe, Amarillo (10 min)
0.5oz each Cascade, Simcoe, Amarillo (0 min)
Dry Hop: 1oz Cascade, 0.75oz Simcoe, 0.5oz Amarillo (7 days)

Yeast:
WLP001 with appropriately sized starter

Mash:
Single infusion, 152* for 60 minutes

Fermentation:
Keep at 65* until almost done then raise to around 68-70* to finish it out.

Target IBU:70
Target OG:1.063

What’s everyone think?
:cheers:

Looks pretty good, I personally would cut the crystal 40 to 1/2lb and drop the carapils. Too much crystal malt could leave the beer too sweet. On my IPAs I like to use 1/2lb of crystal 15 or 20 then the rest 2 row to and OG of 1.065 or so.

Yeah I actually meant to replace the C40 with CaraPils and accidentally added them both. Fixed it above. I wanted just a little more sweetness than my last brew which was just 2 Row and C15. The Munich is just to add a little character.

I use Munich in my APA and I love what it adds, I my have to try it In my next IPA.

Not bad. As mentioned id cut the carapils back to .5 lbs. I like the Munich. I sometimes throw in a few ounces of special b for a bit more complexity .

I also routinely add a pound of sugar to my IPAs. It helps to dry them out!

I’m worried about it being too light if I’m only using 0.5# of Carapils. Maybe I’ll switch to 0.5# of C40 and 0.25# of CaraPils. That would put the total crystal at 6% of the total grain bill. I’ve never used CaraPils before but I keep reading about its benefits to mouthfeel and head retention. I just now did some more research and realize that it doesn’t really add a whole lot to residual sweetness. I do like to have a hint of sweetness in my IPA’s so I think this is more in line with what I’m looking for.

Yes, I misread the above recipe. You could add up to a pound of c10, c20, or c40. If doing so I’d omit the Munich. Or, just use .5 lbs of carapils and a 1lb of Munich too. Experiment with a calculator until you get the srm you are looking for.

I think I’ll be brewing this as written above this weekend though I might lower the 60 min addition to 0.75oz since the BU/GU is through the roof on this and clocking in around 1.26 with a IBU over 80 and a gravity of 1.063. I think I’ll try to dial it in around 70 IBU. I haven’t bought the hops yet so I don’t know the exact AA of them so it’s just an estimate at this point.

I’ve brewed the Pliny the Elder clone recipe a few times. Great west coast style IIPA. Published several time in BYO and/or Zymurgy. You may want to look that up just for added reference information.

Yeah I have a couple copies of that in both Mitch Steele’s IPA and from JZ’s BCS. I definitely looked at it for inspiration but I didn’t really want to create a monster DIPA like that and wanted to keep the gravity under 1.065. I definitely want to tackle that recipe as a late fall brew though.

I entered this recipe into BS2 because I thought it looked really interesting. All the IPAs I’ve done to date have been a simple grain bill of 90% 2 row and 10% c40.

I have all those hops on hand and when I adjusted them for the AA of my inventory the beer came in at 49 IBU. I’m thinking of pushing it into the mid 60s and brewing it in a couple weeks.

I entered this recipe into BS2 because I thought it looked really interesting. All the IPAs I’ve done to date have been a simple grain bill of 90% 2 row and 10% c40.

I have all those hops on hand and when I adjusted them for the AA of my inventory the beer came in at 49 IBU. I’m thinking of pushing it into the mid 60s and brewing it in a couple weeks.[/quote]

That seems awfully low. What’s the AA of your hops? What scale are you using (Tinseth or Rager)?

I entered this recipe into BS2 because I thought it looked really interesting. All the IPAs I’ve done to date have been a simple grain bill of 90% 2 row and 10% c40.

I have all those hops on hand and when I adjusted them for the AA of my inventory the beer came in at 49 IBU. I’m thinking of pushing it into the mid 60s and brewing it in a couple weeks.[/quote]

That seems awfully low. What’s the AA of your hops? What scale are you using (Tinseth or Rager)?[/quote]

Tinseth. Yea I thought it looked low too. Turns out when I saved it to the BS cloud the equipment profile got changed somehow. Looks more like high 92 IBU with my hops on hand.

edit: saved to the cloud as private BTW.

That seems much better. I just got the hops at lunch and put the exact AA in to beersmith and I got it dialed in at around 70 using 0.75oz Simcoe at 60 minutes instead of the full 1 oz. I’ll just dump the extra 0.25oz of simcoe into the dryhop.

I like to try to make all my hops total increments of 1oz cause I don’t buy in bulk. I hate saving half an oz of hops in the freezer which I’ll forget about and never use.

Just my personal preference, but I’m finding I really don’t dig much of any caramel malt in hop-forward beers. If using it, I would use the lightest stuff possible (I recently used Cara8, which is 8*L at 5% of the grist with 5% white wheat), or better yet, stick to using more bready base malts (munich, vienna, MO, pale ale). I find for my palette, the caras (above 10L) just get in the way.

My latest and greatest go-to IPA malt bill is 90% pearl malt, 5% white wheat, 5% cara8, simple sugar, mainly because I’m a huge Heady Topper ho’.

For lower-gravity IPAs (ie below 1.070) especially, I like to get body/malt character from good base malts as opposed to specialty malts.

Just a suggestion here as well: I mistook ‘fruitiness/ester’ for ‘sweetness’ and early on tried making IPA’s that were a little sweeter with more caramel malt. Did not work out well.

Again, just a suggestion, but instead of going for a sweeter/caramelly profile, you may consider splitting the batch, using an attenuative british ale yeast in half and chico in the other. One thing to be careful about here, notty and s-04 both have a tang that does NOT work well in IPA’s IMO. WLP 007 or 013 would work great.

[quote=“Pietro”]Just my personal preference, but I’m finding I really don’t dig much of any caramel malt in hop-forward beers. If using it, I would use the lightest stuff possible (I recently used Cara8, which is 8*L at 5% of the grist with 5% white wheat), or better yet, stick to using more bready base malts (munich, vienna, MO, pale ale). I find for my palette, the caras (above 10L) just get in the way.

My latest and greatest go-to IPA malt bill is 90% pearl malt, 5% white wheat, 5% cara8, simple sugar, mainly because I’m a huge Heady Topper ho’.

For lower-gravity IPAs (ie below 1.070) especially, I like to get body/malt character from good base malts as opposed to specialty malts.[/quote]

Normally I’d agree but the last two IPA’s I made were all base malt with 7% of either C15 or C40 and while they did have a hint of sweetness I was looking for I wanted more of a bready character to the malt. This recipe is still 90% pale, 6% crystal, 4% munich.

My LHBS didnt have CaraPils so I grabbed some Cara8 instead. If another LHBS nearby doesn’t have CaraPils I may just replace the CaraPils with Cara8.

Just a suggestion here as well: I mistook ‘fruitiness/ester’ for ‘sweetness’ and early on tried making IPA’s that were a little sweeter with more caramel malt. Did not work out well.

Again, just a suggestion, but instead of going for a sweeter/caramelly profile, you may consider splitting the batch, using an attenuative british ale yeast in half and chico in the other. One thing to be careful about here, notty and s-04 both have a tang that does NOT work well in IPA’s IMO. WLP 007 or 013 would work great.[/quote]

My last brew was a ruination clone using 1lb C15 and WLP007 so both “caramelly” and “fruity”. I do enjoy the fruitiness of 007 but want to do a more neutral yeast flavor with this brew.

I’m a big fan of Dogfish Head 60 and the recipe for that has zero crystal malt. Of course all this stuff is personal preference but I agree with the previous poster, I like a dryer beer when pushing alot of hops. Of course Stone is making money hand over fist and they like a fair amount of crystal in their beers but for whatever reason it’s just not my thing. On the other hand, if I am making British ales I just love a caramel/slight butterscotch flavor but those beers are not hopped nearly as much as an IPA. Also, once the O.G. starts getting around 1.065 or so the ending gravity is going to rise (especially if you opt to use a fair amount of crystal in the grist). To counter that issue it makes sense to mash at a lower temperature and as a previous poster mentioned adding simple sugars starts to make sense also.

By the way, when determining the hopping it pays to pay attention to the water you are using. Generally speaking, west coast brewers are using fairly soft water compared to what you generally find in the middle of the country where I live. Because of that they can push more hops than I can to achieve the same impression in the beer. Also, high cohumolone hops are gonna start to bite when dealing with hard water, just something else to consider. :smiley: