Yikes! It has been a while since my last blog post. I have been busy doing a lot of research on some new products that we've been testing (blog posts coming soon!) and I've been having to keep a little bit quiet about them, so that hasn't left me with much to talk about. However, now we are about to have our Pils release in a week and the most recent batch of Weedy's Double is a few days away from making its way into pint glasses near you.
So for those of you that read my Pilsener post a few weeks ago, you might remember that I hadn't finalized a recipe yet and I was waiting on some lab results from our other beers before I attempted to brew the first batch. I wanted to know our exact utilization of hops so that when I did my calculations for the hops, I could use accurate formulas and use the recipe development methods that I had learned in Germany. Some of the results were shocking.
For a long time now, we have been backing off the bitterness level of all our beers. We've been doing so slowly and gradually so that there isn't any one batch that tastes significantly different from the previous. When we sent in some of our recent beers for lab analysis though, we found that the IBU's measured were still significantly higher than what our theoretical calculations were calculating. Spare Pair in particular we learned gets about 30 IBU's just from whirlpool hops... Almost 25 IBU's more than what you would normally expect from a flameout addition of hops. But knowing that was the case, we were able to nail down a Pilsener recipe with nearly an exact amount of IBU's in mind.
So brewing the Pilsener, I knew that I wanted to have the same hopping schedule as Spare Pair (which made calculations a lot easier) with much less IBU's. So we did our Spare Pair hop schedule (A small early bittering addition and a whirlpool addition) with hops that have significantly less Alpha Acid percentages to create a Pilsener with 33 IBU's, 20 of which come from the whirlpool addition. Brewing the beer with that hopping schedule, the idea was to create a Pilsener that is low in apparent bitterness, but high in German hop aroma and flavor. The hops we used were a blend from the Hallertau region of Germany which gives our Pils a distinctive lemon-grass hop character with light floral and herbal aromatics.
There is just enough Pils malt to give the beer the classic biscuity malt character that is typical to German Pilseners and the color is very light. In fact, one of the goals was to brew the lightest colored all-malt beer we possibly could and I believe we succeeded well. I can't imagine that we could have done anything to make the beer lighter in color without using adjuncts (and since the goal wasn't to produce a generic American style "triple hopped" Pils, there was no way adjuncts would have been used in this beer). We will be filtering the Pils at the end of this week and it should be shipping out a week from today!
The other exciting upcoming beer is the beer that I probably get bugged about the most... Weedy's Double IPA will be making its return late this week and I am really excited about it. One thing about the Double is that it has actually gone through a few alterations in the few years that we have brewed it. In my opinion, the best batch (until this one) was the first one that we brewed. It used a lot of Citra and Chinook in the boil and dry hop. However, as Citra became scarce, we gradually had to back off the Citra in favor of Centennial. With the amount of Citra that we were using at the time, we would have burned through a year's allotment in 2 batches of Double IPA. I still used Citra in a small amount in the dry hop (Which is really where most of the flavor in this beer comes from anyways), but I missed the effect of the full out Citra. I also felt that the bitterness of the Double was still higher than it should be even though I backed off the IBU's on every batch.
So now I got the chance to brew it for the first time in 9 months a few weeks ago and I knew I wanted to bring back some of the original flavor. I found some more Citra and used it in greater quantities in the dry hop and I'm very pleased with the results. To address the bitterness, I went ahead and cut out the bittering addition completely. We now have a true hopbursted Double IPA (all of the IBU's come from the last 20 minutes of the boil and whirlpool) that has a cleaner flavor from a slightly cooler fermentation, a nice dry mouthfeel like it always has had, and a huge hop aroma with a lot more of the tropical fruit hoppiness that I felt we were missing on some of the most recent batches. I can't wait to release this batch and drink a few pints with guests in the taproom!
No comments:
Post a Comment