A successful New England IPA is like a nice, tall glass of orange juice…but with hops. Or it should be. The last couple attempts we’ve tried to create one of these beasts have resulted in sub-optimal deliciousness (to put it mildly).
So we decided to go with a by-the-book recipe straight from Northern Brewer without changing anything. We bought the recipe for the Fruit Bazooka IPA, with instructions and recipe here. The hops in this recipe were heavy on the Ekuanot (3 oz total) with one ounce each of Mosaic, Azacca, and Citra added to balance.
We did actually modify this recipe slightly based on some advice from our local homebrew shop (my Local HomeBrew Shop)—these guys/gals are great. If you read our previous Ginger Kitty 1.0 attempt you’ll notice I mistakenly added Calcium Carbonate to the beer because that’s what I picked up at the home brew shop when we were looking for ingredients, but I picked that up because I read too quickly the advice from brew forums for NEIPAs and didn’t distinguish in my head that it was Calcium Chloride that is good for IPAs, not Calcium Carbonate. The latter is better for stouts and porters to offset acidity [1]. The former is better for IPAs. The last thing we added was Gypsum. Both Calcium Chloride and Gypsum are salts that lower the pH of the water and can increase flocculation, sweetness, and balance hop flavors [2,3]. According to our local homebrew shop, they recommended adding 1/2 tsp Calcium Chloride and 1/4 tsp Gypsum per 5 gallon batch. They’re recipe calls for adding these salts with 45 minutes remaining in the boil. So that’s what we did.
We also did not do much of a whirlpool and we didn’t use hop bags. The whirlpool is a slow cool down right after the boil that consists of constantly stirring the beer in the kettle and adding hops. We did a faster cool down and just added the hops according to the recipe. No fancy stuff here. In the past—due to one particularly unfortunate IPA experience that turned out with flavors that were rather grassy—we started using hop bags for the dry hopping in the primary and secondary fermentation stages. This means we had to open the lid a few times during the fermentation to place the hop bag in and take it out after dry hopping. While I don’t think this particularly screwed up our first attempt (Ginger Kitty 1.0), I don’t think this was necessary. According to some additional research on forums and talking to our homebrew store peeps, you can just add the hops directly to the beer and they’ll settle to the bottom. If you really want to clear out the trub, then transfer to a secondary fermentation carboy and wait another week. We did this and it seemed to work just fine. No grassy tastes or anything.
So here it is. Our beautiful, juicy, sweet smelling beer transferred to secondary:
I forgot to taste it at this point, but the smell was amazing. It smelled exactly like it ought to—juicy, orangey, sweet, slightly hoppy!
We waited another week or so and then bottled. Part of this schedule was due to Dan being out of town for a bit so we gave this beer an easy-going 3 week fermentation, which is apparently adjustable for NEIPAs. We then bottled and waited about 6 days to try it.
Not to bury the lead here, but Ginger Kitty 2.0 turned out wonderful. I was very pleased with the juicyness and hops flavors. Ekuanot is not a hop we’ve experienced a lot of in NEIPAs at local breweries but it is a great NEIPA hop. We agreed this recipe would be our base and we’d try all sorts of hop variations. The ones we both love and need to retry are Galaxy and El Dorado.
And of course I had to put another picture of baby-Zeus on it :)
Cheers All!
References
[1] Beer and Brewing Magazine’s Calcium Carbonate article by John Haggerty
[2] Beer and Brewing Magazine’s Calcium Chloride article by John Haggerty
[3] Beer and Brewing Magazine’s Gypsum article by Chris J. Marchbanks