Debris Slide Fresh Hop IPA
We hit our hop harvest season again here in the Willamette Valley last month, so I did the proper thing and made another fresh hop IPA. This one is based on last year’s model, but with a little more LME, a different yeast selection, and a different hop profile. I tried to make it Saaz-forward again, but this year I didn’t get quite enough Saaz to use that hop exclusively in the mid- and late-boil additions. So my [Golden] Nugget hops made up the difference where needed. Still, I had a ton of bright green hops rolling around in the sticky, hop-oil-infused wort – a pretty sight!
Compared with last year’s version, this one has more of a heft to it (a good thing). On the downside, there is a harsher bitterness to this one, especially at the finish – not to the degree that it’s bad, but I wish the edge wasn’t there quite so much; it seems to somewhat mask the fresh-hopiness of the flavor. This sharpness could be due to the slightly longer boil time, but I suspect it has a lot to do with the weird “Golden Nugget” hops taking on more of the hop duties in lieu of the softer Saaz. (I did keep the overall alpha addition schedule the same from last year, however.)
I’ve got no photos to share for this time around, so please enjoy the below link to the the namesake for this beer (note that this is, syntactically, a command and not a request):
Style: Fresh-Hop American IPA
Brew Date: Sunday, 9-22-13
Base Malt: 8.0 lbs. light LME
Steeping Grains: 1.0 lbs. Carapils, 1.0 lbs. Centennial-10, 0.75 lbs. Munich Light, 0.75 lbs Wheat, 0.5 lbs. Centennial-60 (all steeped for 35 minutes between 152-160°F)
Yeast: White Labs WLP001 English Ale (pitched at 73°F, started 3 nights before [Thursday night], conditioned on stir plate)
Hops:
- [Golden] Nugget* at 11% α (estimated)
- Saaz at 4% α (estimated)
Hop Schedule:
- 1 oz. Nugget (dried) at 70 min
- 12 oz. Saaz (wet) at 35 min
- 3.5 oz. Saaz (wet) and 2.0 oz Golden Nugget (wet) at 0 min
- 2.25 oz. Golden Nugget (dried): secondary fermentation stage dry hop (duration of secondary)
Gravity Schedule:
- 1.054 at pitch 9-22-12, 3:00pm
- 1.013 final (at kegging 10-14-13)
*We got this breed of hop (2 of our 3 hop plants) prior to my getting into brewing, just because we liked hops. This is an unfortunate hop to have as a brewer, as it seems to not have been bred especially for brewing, and the online homebrew community is peppered with not-so-definitive Q&A threads about this hop and what exactly it is, even. Nonetheless, it has worked fine for me (as a bittering hop) so far.
F+ Beer 