Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Boiling Grump IPA - What a day!

Had an interesting day on Saturday brewing up a clone of Flying Dog's Raging Bitch. I have been wanting to brew this beer for quite some time but never got around to it. Flying Dog actually puts out kits now for their beers monthly, Raging Bitch was earlier this year so I missed it. You have to head up to their brewery to get them but I will do that hopefully in the next few months to try one. I had to resort to crafting my own recipe for this and I had some help. There is a podcast on the Brewing Network that actually did a session to see if they could replicate Raging Bitch so that was the basis of my recipe. The consensus was that they did clone it and it was pretty close to the original. Here is the recipe that I ended up following as best I could. My hops came in at slightly different alpha acids so I had to adjust a little for that but otherwise I just went with what they did:

OG 1.074
SRM 9.8
IBU 73.2
FG 1.013

90 minute boil

16.50lb US 2-row 94% (did not specify the maltster)
1.0lb Crystal 60 6%

Mash at
153F
1.0oz  Warrior 17% at 90'
0.25oz Amarillo 11% at 15'
0.25oz CTZ 15% at 15' (Columbus, Tomahawk or Zeus)
0.67oz Amarillo at 0'
0.67oz CTZ at 0' (Columbus, Tomahawk, Zeus)

WLP400 - Belgian Wit Ale Yeast

Ferment at
68F

The brewer added 0.21oz gypsum to the mash and 0.42oz gypsum to the boil.
 
Brew Day:
My brew day started two days earlier with making up my yeast starter. I visited Maryland Homebrew for my ingredients as usual and came home and made up a starter. I used the Belgian Wit yeast and I made a serious mistake with this one. I usually make a starter with half a cup of DME and 1000ml of water. This time I used a full cup by accident. I just grabbed the wrong measuring cup and wasn't paying full attention to what I was doing. The next morning I had yeast all over the counter that violently went over the sides of the flask. I figured it wouldn't be a huge problem but on brew day morning I crash cooled it and looked like I had little to no yeast left.
 
I started milling my grains and heating water and ended up using my cooler cheap N easy mash tun since the grain bill here was 17.5 pounds. I tried putting my tubing back through the cooler spigot and it wasn't going in easy so I had to trim a little off. I have been using the BIAB method so I haven't used the cooler in a long time. Once I mashed in it was time for another run to MD Homebrew. Since this is a bigger beer I ended up getting 2 vials of White Labs 400 Belgian Wit yeast because there was no time for a new starter.
 
When it was time to run the wort off into the kettle everything went as planned and I didn't end up needing much sparge water at all, maybe 2 gallons and I was up to 7.5 in the kettle. I was getting ready to start the boil and picked up my propane tank to move it over a little from my walking path and noticed that the damn tank was empty. I checked my tank attached to my smoker and that was also dangerously low. No way would I survive a 90 minute boil with that little bit of propane. So, off to Lowes I went to get a tank exchange.
 
The boil went fine and hop schedule was easy. When it was time to chill the wort I hooked up my plate chiller as usual and notice I was missing a hose. I looked high and low in the house and couldn't find one anywhere. So my luck changed then a little as I had some high temp tubing and miraculously had a stainless steel fitting for the chiller and a hose bard. I was able to make it work. The chiller works great, boiling water essentially goes in and then comes out around 75 this time. I think I was running the worth through a little too fast. I pitched both vials of yeast and then the next morning the beer was off and running with a huge head of krausen on top.

 
 

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