My Name is Mud

On our last brew day get-together I decided to change up my previously successful double IPA. I wanted to do an extract brew for time's sake and hauling my equipment around. This time I wanted to push the envelope with abv and hops. Well maybe I should have stuck with my original recipe, I haven't decided yet. I wound up with 2 kegs that have over 4 gallons and Mr. and Mrs. Worthog wound up with 3 or so gallons and fermented with US-04 yeast whereas I fermented with US-05. Nice experiment.

As you can see this brew looks incredibly similar to mud water. "Muddy Mo" if you will. I thought about that for a name, but we'll get to that soon. The merkiness came from tons of pellet hops and scorching the extract some. Now the floaties are because I am kegging 3 oz of hops in each keg which I decided not to filter out the dust. I went with an 80 minute boil here. I figured, the typical homebrew boil is 60 minute and sometimes 90 minutes, why not go with something else. I yielded an 8.1% abv with this guy and some ridiculous amount of IBU's. You can do the math if you'd like. Yes those are Chinese lanterns below, no I did not pick them out.

13 gallons of water

steeped 2 lb of Crystal 60L for 30 or 40 minutes at 150-160 F

16.3 lbs Briess Light LME

3 lbs Briess Light DME

All pellet hops:

2 oz Warrior 90 min

2 oz Simcoe 70 min

4 oz Cascade continuously between 60 and 30 min because they were handed to me!

4 oz Centennial 25 min

whirfloc at 15 min, oops!

2 oz Willamette 10 min

2 oz Simcoe in keg

4 oz Tomahawk in keg

I was talking about how much hops I put in this brew with someone and I told them it was a stupid amount. Suddenly I realized that maybe that's how Lagunitas came up with the name Hop Stoopid for their brew. And it dawned on me that I can make fun of their beer without copyright infringements because, well, it will only be consumed at my home for free! Hence the name, Hop Retarded. Now I know it's not politically correct but it's the only thing that came to mind when I have went beyond stupid and put too many hop pellets in. I hope you enjoy my new logo that will not be printed or distributed :)