We Love IPAs

In December, we bottled Hump’s Hooch. Holy moly, it was good. Hopped with a blend of Zeus, Simcoe, and Amarillo whole leaf hops, six ounces in total, it really scratched that gotta-have-hops itch.

Sadly, it was shortlived. We didn’t even get a chance to save some for competition before the keg ran dry.

It ran dry while we were brewing a follow-up: Hump’s Last Minute IPA. I had hoped instead to make an India Wheat Ale (like a hefeweizen, but with lots and lots of hop character). But the usual homebrew store was closed that day, and the second string store (Hop City in midtown Atlanta) – though awesome as a bottle shop with an amazing selection of commercial beer – was not an effective substitute. Due to their prices and selection, we had to make numerous last minute adjustments to the recipe. An India Wheat Ale was no longer in the cards, so we ended up just making a regular IPA instead.

And this upcoming Sunday, 3/20, is a Brew Day. We’re making… another IPA! This will be our 100th original recipe. So we’re calling it Hump’s 100!

Peach State Brew Off

The Last Minute IPA we made is tasty, but it didn’t fare that great in the Peach State Brew Off (which wrapped up and awarded medals last Saturday, 3/12). I dig it, so I’m not too concerned that judges did not.

We entered a few other brews into that contest, too:

• Hump’s Naughty Monk Ale: Our watermelon-infused Belgian Tripel (the one made with real watermelon puree, not extract) was sent in and scored higher than any of our other entries. Final score: 32.5 out of 50 (better than it sounds as 30-37 is the “very good” range). But certainly no 45 (which is what Hump’s Old Humperdink Barley Wine scored at last year’s Peach State Brew Off).
• Hump’s 10th Anniversary: This beer was a great big amber ale – with a lot more hops and malt used than in a typical amber ale. Alas, judges did not agree. One said it seemed like a normal American Amber Ale – not an “Indian” Amber Ale. I’ve had a lot of amber ales in my day, and that judge is smoking crack. They must have a serious hop-bomb entry beforehand to make this one seem muted, because – to me – it was way too big (over 7% abv) and had way too much hop aroma and flavor to be a normal amber ale entrant.
• Hooch: This wasn’t, technically, a Hump’s brew. It was brewed by friend and fellow home-brewer, Scott Stinson. He brews with extract, so I converted the recipe for Hump’s Hooch from all-grain to mini-mash, and he cooked it up. We entered it as a “team” entry, with both our names on it. I’m a bit lost on the judges comments. They indicated that it was watery and not very bitter. Did they have the same beer? It was fairly full-bodied and extremely hoppy. It was also drier than many commerical examples and was quite drinkable, especially given its strength and massive amounts of hops. It’s really disappointing to see comments like this – that don’t even seem to describe the right beer… One suggested it would do well as an American Pale Ale entry – at nearly 8%abv?!?!? (not to mention 6 ounces of high alpha hops…)
• Hump’s Chocolate Milkshake: The lowest score of all the entries. Admittedly, that was expected. I felt it was definitely the weakest. Surprisingly the judges seemed to like it, but they felt that I may have miscategorized it: I entered it as a spice/herb/vegetable beer due to the cocoa nibs and vanilla bean and put the “base style” as robust porter. They didn’t think the base beer was robust enough. Strangely, they said the chocolate character was strong and the vanilla character was too low. That is the complete opposite of my own impression of the beer. I can barely taste any chocolate other than character from chocolate malt (not real cocoa flavor), but I can taste lots of vanilla. Maybe they don’t know what these ingredients are supposed to taste like???

You can read the judges’ feedback for yourself by checking out the Contests page.

Perhaps we’ll have better luck next year.

Hop Plants

Two of our four hop plants are already growing back this year. The Willamette is the surprise star of the garden right now. Chinook has just started to show some tiny leaves. No sign yet of Horizon (which I’m looking forward to trying if it ever grows and flowers) or Centennial (which, unfortunately, is even worse than the Horizon – I will be mildly surprised if it actually comes back at all this year…).

I’ll have two weeks of time off coming up soon, so the wife and I hope to make some progress on the garden. Perhaps we can get it in better shape than last year, and that the effort will help everything stay alive. Less heat would help, too. Last year’s crazy hot summer burned up everything in the garden. We didn’t even collect 1/2 ounce of hops from four plants last year. Depressing…

Muddy Rye

We’ve recently tapped into Hump’s Smoked Rye Porter – made with two pounds of smoked malt and four pounds of rye malt. The result: a tasty beer with a nice hop aroma, too (decent bit of Amarillo and Simcoe late hops). The downside: the texture is way too thick.

The Roggendoppelbock turned out this way, too: incredibly viscous, especially considering the final SG reading (1.017 for the smoked porter). The Wry Wit we made last year also used a lot of rye, but it did not exhibit this symptom. So we turned to the internet to investigate the what-for.

One fact worth pointing out: we employed a protein rest for the Wry Wit, due to using lots of unmalted grains (flaked barley, flaked rye, and flaked oats). Did the protein rest “fix” the viscosity for that earlier brew?

Most of what I’ve read suggests that a beta glucan rest is what is actually called for when using large amounts of rye, oats, or unmalted grains. But at 122 degrees (the temperature of the protein rest I employed in making Wry Wit), beta-glucanase and cytase are also active. So, at that temperature, protein and beta-glucan rests are combined (at least to some degree).

So I’m going to give rye another go this spring, and use a beta-glucan rest at 110 degrees to see if it fixes this issue. And if not, I’ll try another one later with another protein rest…

Dishearteningly, I can’t find anyone describing exactly the same problem I’m having. Most suggest that these rests just reduce viscosity and gumminess of the mash, making lautering easier and faster. I did have very slow sparges with both the smoked porter and the roggendoppelbock, but the viscosity problem I’m having is in the finished product, not just the mash.

Doggone it, I’m going to figure this out! What a fun way to do science experiments, eh?

I used two pounds of rye malt in my recipe. Doug mentioned that he and his friends have designed plenty of rye pale ale recipes, too, and that they’ve found that one pound – or maybe even a little less – is just right. Even one and a half pounds is a little too much since some of the flavors in the rye begin to detract from the finished beer when it is present in too large a quantity. I don’t mind the “Reeb” finished product – in fact I like it a lot. But the rye flavor is certainly strong – at least when drinking the first one. If you have a second helping, you don’t notice as much :)

While at the homebrew store I bought three ounces of high-alpha hops – the final acquisition of luscious hops for my upcoming double IPA. While there I also decided to do my part to help out with the hop shortage by purchasing a couple of hop rhizomes. This, of course, is also a hedge against decreasing hop availability and rising hop prices – and it’s just plain fun! They are already starting to produce shoots, protruding from the dirt. Malin is planning their final planting location in the yard and has already designed a trellis for the vines once they start to get big. The hop vines can grow as long as 20′ in the first year; and, once they are mature and really growing (not sure how many years go by before that happens, but it apparently doesn’t happen in the first year), they can grow as much as 1′ per day! We’re pretty stoked. Doug says that his hop plants grow great, despite our not having a climate like the classic hop producing regions (Pacific Northwest US, Southern Germany, and Southeast England).

I bought one rhizome each of Mount Hood – a US aroma hop based on a German Hallertauer cultivar – and Chinook – another US hop that is high in alpha acids (so it is frequently used for bittering) and has strong notes of evergreen (pine needles) with some bitter citrus (grapefruit).

Overall, victory was handed to the more authentic (both in flavor and, of course, origin) Maredsous. Their beer had more character in the aroma – like a distinct aroma of sweet malt syrup and a subtle aroma of pipe tobacco. Their beer also had a little more complexity in the flavor, and it had more residual sweetness while maintaining a dry finish, giving it a richer taste. Finally, the carbonation of Maredsous was crisper and more refreshing than mine.
But it was a fun taste test. I think my beer was quite tasty, and overall it faired well even though it was not crowned king of the evening. My beer had a soft, dusty character on the front of the palate and a dryer finish with more peppery phenols – not unlike many authentic Belgian Dubbels, but unlike the Maredsous. My beer formed a bigger, fluffier head that lasted longer than the Maredsous’; but the head in the Maredsous was better-looking (uneven and rocky) and left lots of lace on the glass. The last time I tasted this homebrew, it had a distinct fruity note, particularly banana – not this time, however. But the esters in the Maredsous were not particularly fruity either.

My wife snapped a few side-by-side photos, for visual comparison. The color of the two beers was strikingly similar, though the Maredsous was slightly clearer and had a deeper red tone (highlights that almost looked violet). The one on the left (with the green collar around the glass stem and no lace on the glass) is my Praying Monk Ale:

In other news, someone who found this site e-mailed me to ask for a recipe this past week. To anyone who happens across this blog: I will happily share my recipes. I may have given this guy more than he bargained for: he asked for an older recipe (from 2001), so I gave him both the recipe I cooked up as well as a revised recipe (my knowledge of styles and my recipe formulation skills are much better now, after 7 years of brewing). I also gave him a bunch of tips, too. I don’t know if he ever reads this blog or if he just found the Brews section of this site from a web-search. Either way, I was excited to share the info with him.

The Reeb is now fully carbonated and quite tasty. It is a light, soft American Pale Ale – not a hop-bomb, but flavorful and hoppy nevertheless. My palate has historically had a difficult time picking out the flavor of rye, and that situation remains. I can’t really detect a graininess or spiciness, which is how the flavor rye in beer is often described. I’d love to try German Roggenbier, since these beers are made with 50% or more rye malt. Surely the taste of that beer would enlighten my taste buds. My beer includes only 20% Rye. I don’t know how much Rye they use in Terrapin Rye, which is the commercial beer most akin to Reeb. My homebrew is less hoppy, more bready, and slightly smaller than Terrapin’s. I definitely enjoy both beers; but, without a side-by-side, I can’t honestly say if I like Reeb just as much as I like Terrapin Rye. Perhaps that calls for another Hump’s one-on-one showdown in the coming weeks!

There is now a commercial beer in China that has taken that name. I suppose I couldn’t be sued if the beer’s maker doesn’t have it trademarked here. I wonder if I should file for the trademark in case they haven’t already done so…

Anyhow, I racked my Reeb over a half-ounce of Amarillo hops last Friday morning. It tasted pretty decent, and Amarillo hops smell amazing, so I think it will turn out grand. I think I’ve finally perfected the label for this batch of brew, too:

This evening I’ve been preparing a brew plan to last me most of the year. It involves numerous low-hop brews (due to the recent hop shortage). I’m thinking of buying extra hops while getting ingredients for those recipes. Doug, the owner of the homebrew store, will sell no more than three ounces of hops for each batch, but I have a few recipes that only call for one ounce. If I tack on a couple of extra ounces, then after three months I’ll have enough hops to brew up a double IPA. My recipe, Brain Bludgeoner, calls for an ounce each of Warrior, Columbus, Simcoe, and Centennial (all high-alpha American hop varieties) and two ounces of Glacier.

I’m praying for Doug (and a bit for me, too) that his store manages to flourish despite the hop crisis. With luck, he’ll find a new supplier or his current supplier will manage to acquire more hops – though I’m sure prices will double (or more) if and when that happens… But I don’t mind – hops are typically the least-cost ingredient in a batch of beer at current prices ($2.50 per ounce – about double the cost of hops when I first started brewing). Even if they go up to four bucks per ounce, it would still only be $24 for all of the hops in my big ol’ double IPA. The malt extract for that same batch runs over $30, or a little over $20 for all grain. Since I do a mix (5 or so pounds of grain and then the rest extract), I’d be looking at right at $30 for the fermentables. Considering that the vast majority of flavor and character in that type of beer is from the hops, it doesn’t seem outrageous for that ingredient to cost so close to half of the bill…

My plan for this year has me “saving up” for hops every few months so that I can brew a Double IPA this year as well as both a classic English IPA and a nice American IPA. The American IPA is an adaptation/reformulation of my Hellishly Hopped Ale, which was a fantastic beer that found itself squarely between two styles: American Pale Ale and American IPA.

I tried to look online for hops and found a very similar situation. Even some of the really big online stores are all out of plugs and leaf hops and are limiting quantities of pellet hop purchases. And they are changing anywhere from three to eight dollars per ounce!

I’ve read a bit about hops recovering by 2010. I’m hoping it happens sooner than that, but it may not. It typically takes a couple of years for new land to yield good crops. So the upswing in production that began in 2007 as a reaction to the shortage won’t really be fruitful until the 2009 harvest. This year’s harvest is likely to be much better than last year’s, but harvest isn’t until fall. So 2008 hops won’t likely roll into homebrew shops until 2009. It relieves me somewhat to see that the Boston Beer Company (makers of Samuel Adams) seem to be counting on better fortunes next year. One of the three beers that won their recent Long Shot homebrew competition was a Double IPA (if you follow the link, select the year 2007). They postponed its appearance to 2009 due to the shortage. So the six-pack this year has only two brews: a Weizenbock (pretty good) and a Grape Pale Ale (notably less good). When they get to the Double IPA next year, it will reportedly be the largest single batch of Double IPA ever brewed. I don’t have a link to the source of that report, but I heard it when listening to the archives for The Jamil Show. They’ve had the Double IPA winner, Mike McDole, on their show a few times and talked about the competition and his recipe in several episodes. They also had the Weizenbock winner, Rodney Kibzey, on the show this past December.

Speaking of weizens, my next batch will be a Dunkles Hefeweissbier (Dunkelweizen for short). It will only need one ounce of hops. I’m basing the recipe loosely on the base beer for the Berry Weizen I made in 2007, except that I’m experimenting with some new grains: Dark Wheat Malt (which doesn’t actually impart a very dark color) and Chocolate Wheat Malt. I think the Chocolate Wheat Malt would be even more appropriate as part of the grist for a Weizenbock, but I plan on using a little in the Dunkelweizen I’ll be making.