I have yet to brew an IPA, and I’m looking for some help with a recipe. Most recipes that I’ve looked up are using pale malt, pilsner malt, victory or munich malt, and even torrified wheat. Im not sure what the best percentages are. I will list my current inventory of hops and hopefully someone can point me in the right direction. Obviously I would like to use up some of the hops I have sitting around, but Im fairly close to a LHBS if I need to grab some other hops.
5oz Falconers Flight 7cs AA - 9.9%
3oz Falconers Flight AA - 10.8 %
2oz Zythos AA - 10.9%
1oz Cascade AA - 8.9%
1oz Hallertau AA - 3.9%
1oz Perle AA - 9.4%
I also currently have :
10+lbs 2 Row
1lb Munich Malt
1lb Carapils
.75lb Crystal 60
That bill looks fine except sub out the munich and throw in some victory. You’ll get lighter color and a little biscuity flavor to boot.
Edit: forgot the hops. Go ahead and buy some magnum hops (you’ll use them a million times over for bittering once you do) and use them to bitter the IPA. I always recommend a first wort hop over 60 minute additions, but that’s just me, you could go either way. Then I’d throw in the cascade and falconers flight (1/2 oz each) at 20 mins. Do it again at 15, and do a full oz. of falconers at 5 and flameout. When you’re dry hopping throw in 2 oz of your 7 cs. That’s if you only want to use what you have. If you’re willing I’d recommend going out and snagging some citra and couple it with the last two additions of falconers.
I would just go with the 10lbs of 2 row and the .75-1lb caramel 60 for the grain bill
Add .75oz falconers 60 mins
1oz falconers 20 mins
2oz falconers 5 mins
1oz cascade flameout
And dry hop with 2oz of zythos 1 week before packaging
I would keep it simple like that for your first IPA
use 1056,WL001 or us05
ferment in low to mid 60’s
Well if I were doing it I would ditch all the crystal, use the Munich and maybe add some Victory as has been suggested however I usually use just a little Amber malt myself. If you start adding a bunch of crystal malt to IPA’s you’ll drive up the ending gravity making the beer heavier and harder to drink. Additionally, that sweetness is going to cover some of the hops. Bear in mind that I am usually trying to dry out most beers I make unless I’m doing low gravity stuff in which case I will try and trick the drinker into thinking the beer is bigger than it really is (and adding crystal malt is a very good way to do that).
Magnum is a great bittering hop, I use it alot in lagers. For ales I generally go with Warrior but both are very good. I try to use low cohumolone hops if I can but certainly for bittering.
Use all the malt except the cara-pils. You need to get as much gravity as possible. You need to get to 1.060-70 to support all of those hops. I recently had a bottle of Founder’s All Day IPA, and I thought it was over hopped for the malt character. I was disappointed, because I liked the idea of a lower gravity IPA.
All the hops you mentioned should work well together. I would probably use the Perle for bittering because it is not going to give you a lot of flavor compared to the others. I don’t know what Zythos is so you could probably also use that to help bitter. All of the other hops are aromatic so you could play around with the mix. I would probably save the Hallertau for something else too.
Shoot for 45-60 IBU and then add the flavor hops at the end of the boil. If you can chill your wort quickly, do a 20 min and 2 min addition. If you don’t have a chiller yet, add some finish hops at 2 minutes and just dry hop for the aroma. If you cannot chill quickly a lot of those aroma hops will turn bitter and be wasted.
