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 :)

A.M. IPA

Over the weekend I got invited out for a mountain bike ride and brewing beer combo. Two hobbies I like, sure lets go. See ya at 8. 8 pm right? No, 8 am. The night before I was at the "K" drinking and then to home to cap off the night with an Old Rasputin and a glass of water (Old Rasputin Light). As I rolled out of bed I knew I was in store for some hurtin. I made it though about 3/4 of the rocky, hilly trails before I realized I was dehydrated to the point of dizziness. So let's go brew some beer. The guys all stopped for some biscuits and gravy. I couldn't stomach that. We got back to the brew spot and I was feeling back to 100%. We all pitched in and got a 10 gallon batch of extra IPA going using tons of homegrown hops. Check out those bad boys on the 2nd year of production.

My Double IPA - Deliciousness

I finally made a beer for a hop head like myself. About 120 IBUs and 7.8% abv = some good stuff. Just to be hard on myself there is some room for improvement but I'm keeping the recipe around. So I kegged some and bottled some. I still need to come up with a fun label. The kegged beer tastes much better because I'm able to dial in a little more carbonation which really brings out the hop aroma and giving a nice creamy head on this beer. I compare this beer with an Avery Maharaja. It's a smoother IPA with a complex hop taste as opposed to just a powerful slap in the face hop taste. It keeps getting better every day in the keg. Maybe I didn't use enough corn sugar when bottling? I'm pretty sure this will go in my top 5 for June, but I've got a lot of days left in June so we'll see. If you're just now seeing my site for the first time there are a couple different posts about brewing this beer and the explosion on the ceiling it caused. This was an expensive and loaded beer made to enjoy and savor. Maybe I shouldn't be slamming so much down.

IPA Brew

I took off the training wheels and stepped up my game. It was time to make an extremely hoppy, high gravity beer (my style). With the kegerator complete I'll probably keg most of this and bottle a few for those really interested. I woke up at 2am this morning and remembered that I forgot to take a reading. So 8 hours after transferring I took the original gravity and it was 1.076 or so. It will probably be a little over 8% abv. I got a yeast starter going strong the night before and this beer is ACTIVE! From the picture you can tell I got it a little too full but wort activity is starting to push it's way through the airlock now. Any of you brewers know if that's bad? I think it should be alright because no oxygen is coming in.

Check out this recipe I kind of compiled:

Mashed 1 lb of Crystal 40L, .5 lb Munich, .5 Wheat

6.6 lbs Briess Light LME

3 lbs Light DME

WLP001 California Yeast - Starter

Hop time...

1 oz Warrior 70 min

1 oz Simcoe 50 min

1 oz Cascade 35 min

1 oz Cascade 15 min

.5 oz Amarillo 5 min

1 oz Simcoe at KO

1 oz dry leaf Cascade 1st fermentation

1 oz dry leaf Cascade 2nd fermentation

116 IBU - OG 1.076 - FG 1.015 - SRM 9