Brewing a great IPA
Written for CHBA by Andrew Childs, Behemoth Brewing Company. January 2018
Hey Christchurch home brewing people Andrew Childs from Behemoth Brewing here. I want to share a bit of knowledge I have built up over the last 5 years of commercial brewing, why brewing competitions are so important to improving the beer you brew and a few helpful tips to brewing a good IPA (I have been known to brew a couple).
Now home brew competitions is how I got my start in commercial brewing. I won the "Wellington in a Pint Competition" about 6 years ago, then brewed a Coffee Brown Ale with my mates at Yeastie Boys. We then made that our first Behemoth beer. Entering comps is a great way of getting honest feedback on your beer. What you did well, what you did not and possibly how to make it better. No one likes hearing their beer is not awesome, but I can tell you from judging commercial and home brew comps that a lot of people enter beers that they do no know are faulted and this feedback definitely has helped some people refine their processes and recipes.
So how do you make an awesome IPA? (now I am talking about American IPAs or NZ IPA's I will leave English IPAs for someone else)
1) Pitch enough yeast. OK this is not just for IPA's, it is for every beer! If you are not pitching enough yeast (enough Viable yeast cells) that yeast will get stressed and create off flavours, this will detract from your hop character then therefore will not make a great IPA.
2) Malt. Malt is good, it provides the base over which you can play with hop flavours. I think this should be 95% Pale malt and smaller amounts of Light-Medium Crystal and possibly other malts such as Munich, Vienna, Carapils, Aromatic malt or something else to add a bit of body and Character
3) HOPS! No shit Andrew?! Well yes. One of the reasons I love hoppy beers is they are diverse. You can get stonefruit, tropical, floral, spice and the combination is limitless! In NZ we are lucky to have some awesome hops, but one of my favouite things is mixing NZ and US hops to get heaps of awesome flavour combinations. I think of hops I think of flavours not bitterness, we generally put 80%-100% of our hotside hops in the whirilpool, very little bitterning or boil additions. Add the amount that you want your IBU to end up as. Use brewing software to estimate what IBU you will get and work backwards. Then dry hop a minimum of 100g of dry hops but as much as 200-300g for a real hop monster
4) Oxygen. After fermentation do not let any Oxygen anywhere near your beer! Kegging helps with this, Oxygen is the death of hoppy flavour and aroma.
Well that is it for me. We appreciate you guys and girls supporting our beers so much.
Chur,
Andrew
