Version 2 India Black Ale Recipe

I took the judges' advice to heart from my entry results in the 7 Bridges/Bison Brewing Pro-Am competition, and with the secondary fermentation now dry-hopping and cold-crashing,  the recipe is below. The main things I have attempted to change in this version are:

1. More hop aroma and more hop bitterness.
2. Less astringency from the dark and chocolate malts.
3. Chewier, richer malt character.
4. HIgher % ABV.
5. Drier finish. 

Northern Lights Organic Cascadian IBA v 2.0 all-grain

Ingredients: All-Grain

11.5 lb. Gambrinus Organic Pilsner Malt

8.0 oz. Great Western Organic Munich Malt

1.0 lb. Briess Organic Black Malt (500 ºL) cold steep 12 hours - then add 8.0 oz sparged grains to mash

4.0 oz Weyermann Organic Carafa® 2 (dark chocolate) cold steep 12 hours - then add 2.0 oz sparged grains to mash

12.0 oz Great Western Organic Crystal 60 Malt (60 ºL)

4.0 oz. Organic rye flakes

4.0 oz. Organic oat flakes

12.0 oz. Candi sugar - home made from organic cane sugar

1 teaspoon citric acid to candy sugar mix (didn't have for this batch) substituted a splash of maple syrup

0.5 oz Summit Whole Hops bag in mash (60 min), then empty bag into first wort (90 min)13.98 AAU


0.5 oz Centennial bag in Mash (60 min), then first wort (90 min) 6.2 AAU

1.0 oz. American Bravo Organic Whole Hops (90 mins) 13.5 AAU First Wort

1.0 oz. American Centennial Organic Whole Hops (30 mins) 6.2 AAU

0.5 oz. American Summit Organic Pellet Hops (30 mins) 15.1 AAU

2.0 oz. New Zealand Cascade Pellet Hops (10 mins) 7.8 AAU

2.0 oz. American Summit Pellet Hops (5 mins) 15.1 AAU

2.0 oz. New Zealand Cascade Pellet Hops (dry hops) 

3.0 oz. American Summit Organic Pellet Hops (dry hops)

1 capsule Servomyces (15 mins)

½ tsp. Organic Irish Moss Flakes (15 mins)

5 tsp Gypsum to mash water

1 tsp Burton Salts to Mash Water

White Labs WLP 013 Organic (London Ale) yeast

0.75 cup organic corn sugar for priming

Step by Step all-grain Brewing Instructions:

Make a yeast starter from the White Labs London Ale liquid yeast three days prior to pitching. Cool in refrigerator to separate yeast cake. Pour off most of the liquid.

Cold steep (60º F – 68º F) 1.0 lb Briess Organic Black Malt (500 ºL) and 4.0 oz Weyermann Organic Carafa® 2 (dark chocolate) in ½ water 12 hours (over night). Sparge with 3 pints 170 ºF water.

Steep the crushed grain in 6.0 gallons of water at 153 ºF for 60 minutes. 

Add 1.0 oz. American Bravo Organic Whole Hops to mash in a hop bag.

At 30 minutes steep, add 1/2 of the cold steeped dark adjunct malts to main mash.

At 60 minutes, pour two 1/2 gallon pitchers of wort back over the mash till clear runnings. Sparge with 5.0 gallons of 170º water using rotating sparge arm for 20 minutes.

Place 7 gallons of wort in 8.0  gallon boil kettle including the ½ gallon of cold steeped dark wort and 12 oz of Candi Sugar. Boil for 90 minutes. While boiling, add the hops, Irish moss, and yeast nutrient as per the schedule. 

While boil is going on, reduce third runnings in large pot, bringing 2 gallons down to 1/2 gallon. Add reduction to main boil at last possible moment, when wort boil is complete. Use two smaller pots next time, or a hotter flame.

Cool wort to 68º as quickly as possible using wort chiller. 

Transfer to sanitized 6.5 gallon primary fermenter.  Top off with boiled & cooled water to 5.0 gallons if necessary.

Aerate the wort with oxygen for 50 seconds and pitch the starter yeast. Hold at 68 ºF for 7 days or until fermentation subsides. Use a blow off tube instead of an airlock to avoid a yeast explosion.

When the primary fermentation is complete, rack beer to 5 gallon carboy, avoiding any splashing to prevent aerating the beer. Add the dry hop pellets and keep at 68 ºF for 5 days. Cold crash to 32 ºF over 7 days to settle out hops. Add isinglass finings three days before bottling.

Boil 2 cups water, add 0.75 cups bottling sugar, cool to 68º. Add to bottom of bottling bucket and syphon in beer.

Bottle or keg cold. Note: at 32º, the syphon hose tends to clog with ice. But if you let the beer warm, the hops float to the top.

Allow the beer to carbonate for one week at room temperature, then condition for 2 weeks at 50 - 54 ºF and enjoy your Northern Lights IBA.

The finished volume is: 5.25 gallons

The original gravity is: 1.070

The alcohol is: 9.5%

The color is: 126 HCU (~41 SRM)

The bitterness is: 99 IBU

The final gravity is:  1.012

Brewed Sunday, 6/12/2011

Racked to Secondary 6/18/2011 & began dry hopping

Bottled ______

IBA Explosion!!!

Came up with some special steps in brewing my Northern LIghts Organic India Black Ale, version 2 . . . maybe too special. The original gravity came to 1.070 after a 90 minute boil, with 99 IBU by my calculations using The Beer Recipator. These high gravity results seemed great, until I got home from work this afternoon and discovered the airlock filled with foam and a steady stream of CO2 off-gassing through the top. A small wet spot on the ceiling of my insulated fermentation chamber should have given me a hint that there was pressure building, but I wasn't quite prepared for what was to come moments later.

Airlock atop 6 1/2 gallon carboy moments before  "the event".

I have not seen such a vigorous fermentation so far in my brewing career, so I foolishly thought it would be a good idea to get a clean airlock loaded up with vodka and just replace the one that was having difficulties. With my two children watching from behind me, I pried off the airlock. Bad idea, unless you wrap the whole works with a towel. I got a nasty blast of sour chocolate yeast foam full in the face, in my hair, across my glasses, over my hands, and in a blast radius covering the inside walls and top of the chamber.

The mess was pretty easy to mop up, but my wife says our mud room now smells like, "a dive bar where generations of old drunks have puked up beer and only been partially cleaned up after."

The new airlock filled with foam almost immediately and threatened to blow again. So I yanked it out and draped the opening with plastic wrap while I figured out how to build a blow-off tube and sanitized reservoir from available materials. I feel like I'm reenacting that scene with the mission control engineers from 'Apollo 13', "Houston, we have a problem!"

I cut the hole too big on my first try, but got a snug (and hopefully airtight) seal by slicing through an airlock and  threading through some spare reinforced hose from my sparging setup.

The fermenter's temperature had also reached 73 ºF, so I packed the chamber with ice packs and began to bring things back to a reasonable range.

My handy Erlenmeyer Flask with a Chlorine Bleach solution set up to collect run off from the blow-off tube.

John Palmer suggests you use at lest a 1" diameter blow-off tube to reduce the chance of a clog and further eruptions, but 1/2" is all I have on hand. It now sounds like there is something alive in my fermenting cabinet. A near constant, but thoroughly unpredictable rhythm of boisterous yeast-breathing bubbles.

Judging of My Northern Lights IBA

Back in late April I tried my first crack at creating my own recipe, Northern Lights India Black Ale, and entered it for judging. The bad news is I didn't win the tickets to the Great American Beer Festival in Denver. The good news is, I did pretty good for a first attempt.

The event was this year's organic brewing AHA sanctioned Pro-Am competition sponsored by 7 Bridges Cooperative and Bison Brewing. My final average score was 28, placing the beer into the high end of the Good (21 - 29) category. While there's lots of room for  improvement, 28 out of a possible 50 points is not a bad start. The judges comments have given me some valuable pointers to improving on the recipe. And I have ordered ingredients to try again this weekend on version 2. Only this time the beer will be all-grain instead of partial mash.

Here's the official score sheet key to the Good section:

Good (21 - 29) - A satisfactory beer that generally fits the style parameters. Scores near the upper end of this range may have only a few minor flaws or be slightly out of style and also may be lacking in balance or complexity. Scores near the lower end of this range tend to have more flaws and are likely to have stylistic inconsistencies as well.

Both judges noted sediment around the neck of the bottle, which might have resulted from shipping, but most of their comments match my own thoughts to improve the recipe.

1. The beer got perfect scores on appearance - it is a really black IPA with a good head and wonderful lacing.
2. My hopping did not produce enough aroma, and the bitterness wasn't strong enough to balance the dark grain in the recipe. I have learned from later batches, how to make hoppier beers by using very different approaches to the hop additions and brew times. 
3. I clumsily over-sparged the specialty grains, and also over-oxidized the wort in dumping it into the brew kettle. Until I get two new larger kettles for HLT and lauter tun, I am siphoning my transfers back to the mash tank/brew kettle to prevent oxygenation of the wort.

The next batch will be better (famous last words?), in at least three ways. But all in all, when I count in the fun I had designing and making the beer, and the bounty of having a full five gallons of a good black IPA to savor, I still give it pretty high marks. The recipe can take a few tweaks, and over time I'll become a more accomplished home brewer.

Cold Crash for Dry Hops

Before photo: 5 oz. each of whole organic Summit and Centennial hops after one week dry hopping.

So far, my batches of beer have been good, but the hop aromas have been disappointing. This brew will be different. My second original recipe, Bin Laden's Dead Double IPA, is loosely based on Alan Spirits' HOTD Blue Dot D-IPA. The cake at the top of the fermenter is all lose hop buds, and lots of them. I used a paper funnel to get the hops into the carboy, and about half way through the first 5 oz. of hops, I started to wonder how difficult all those floating buds were going make the transfer to a bottling bucket.

After sunset I hauled the dry hopped brew out to my emptied lagering freezer for cold crashing. I'll lower the temperature by 4 ºF each day for the next week until the probe reads 32 ºF. Some of the the homebrew forums advise this procedure as the best way to get those hops to settle to the bottom of the fermenter. Something tells me I'm going to get a little bit under a full five gallons on this batch.

The second thing I started wondering about as I filled the bottle with those buds, was how I would ever get them out again. A bent aluminum light stand leg might work to pry the buds out one or two at a time. Couldn't take more than a week.  But then I found the great advice online that a bottle washer attached to a garden hose should blast the hops right out of the carboy.

Big League Beer Prices

A "large" size glass of "premium beer", Manny's Pale Ale from Georgetown Brewing, costs $9.75 at the ball park. This is kind of funny, since a full growler at the brewery costs only $5.00.

Going All-Grain on a Blue Dot Clone

Here's a very low res video of my makeshift lautering setup, shot with my IPhone. The kettle has a nice false-bottom.

One expert (Papazian) says use 1 quart of water per lb. of grain, another (Palmer) says use  2 quarts per lb. I ended up splitting the difference at 1.5 quarts per lb. Which Palmer recommends as a good compromise further into his book. With just over 15 pounds of grain, my 7 1/2 gallon boil kettle barely held the full mash.

Our new gas stove proved to be an unpredictable tool for keeping an even mash temperature from top to bottom of the kettle. During the first half hour of the mash I applied a very low heat to keep inching the thermometer reading above 152 ºF. But I know the pure liquid at the bottom of the mash, underneath the two-inch high false bottom, was hotter. And I quickly discovered how long the heated stainless steel bottom would keep transferring heat after I turned off the burner. I had added a half gallon of 170 ºF water with heat from the stove, and suddenly the core temperature jumped to 160 ºF.  Quickly I moved the nearly full kettle to the sink, (fortunately we have a galley kitchen), and a half gallon of cold water and sprayed cold water over the bottom and sides of the kettle. This got the the center of the mash to approximately156 ºF with half an hour to go in the sixty minute mash.

My homemade rotating sparge arm worked amazingly well, but I think I'll make some modifications on the re-design. All stainless steel, smaller holes, less solder. Or just buy one that's pre-built.

I followed Jon Buhagiar's DIY brass design from his BoHack blog site. Note he has an incorrect size for the large diameter tube that has to fit over the o-rings and into the transfer tubing. My local hobby shop was out of the piece in brass, so I ended up using stainless steel for the outer piece. Construction of the arm itself involved trial and quite a few errors. The water outlet holes need to be as small as possible, and I found that the gravity flow pressure wasn't enough to properly turn with more than five holes on each side of the rig. My soldering was also a bit out of practice, so I ruined my first try by filling the arm with solder. By the second attempt, I decided to just reheat the whole thing and force most of the excess solder out of the tube with an old coat hanger wire. At the end, because brass has a fine coating of lead, I soaked the arm in a solution of two parts vinegar to one part hydrogen peroxide.

Even though the arm worked flawlessly on my first lauter, I think I'll try one more time and use stainless steel all the way through.

With 8 oz of whole bittering hops and another 4 oz of pellet aroma hops, transferring from the brew kettle to the primary fermenter took a long time and a lot of stirring to keep the drain screen clear.

In another first, I dispensed with cloth bags for boiling the hops. This is good for added bittering and hop aroma, but made the transfer after chilling the wort slow as molasses. Even with a stainless steel kettle tube screen, the whole hop cones and the massive trub from the sparge kept clogging up the exit valve.

The proteins and sugars began to settle out after I pitched the Scottish Ale Yeast starter.  OG came in slightly high, at 1.080. This is going to be one big Double IPA.

I gave the wort sixty seconds of pure oxygen to make it a more comfortable environment for the yeast. Sure enough, by Monday morning fermentation had begun. In the afternoon, the trub was churning and bubbles popped through the airlock in a steady rhythm. The heat blanket and temperature control are set, and the insulated fermenting cabinet is keeping the surrounding temperatures stable. In a few days the batch should be ready for transfer to secondary and dry-hopping.

Here's my interpretation of the HOTD Blue Dot clone recipe from Brew Your Own Magazine:

Blue Dot IPA clone (all- grain)

•  Weyermann Organic Pilsner Malt, 13 Lbs. 2 oz.
•  Organic Rye Flakes, 2 Lbs.
•  American Summit Whole Hops 4 oz. (75 mins) – replacing Warrior
•  American Chinook Whole Hops 4 oz. (40 mins) – replacing Magnum
•  Belgian Admiral Hop Pellets 4 oz. (10 mins) – replacing Columbus
•  American Summit Whole Hops 5 oz. (dry hop) – replacing Warrior
• American Centennial Whole Hops 5 oz. (dry hop) – replacing Amarillo
•  Yeast: Wyeast Scottish Ale, 125 ml XL
•  ¾ teespoon Organic Irish Moss (10 mins)
•  1 Servomyces capsule (10 mins)
•  Organic Corn Sugar (Dextrose), 0.75 cup for bottling

1. Start yeast at least 48 hours before brew day, then chill over night in refrigerator to settle the yeast, then bring to room temperature in a dark place. Dump off excess liquid before pitching.
2. Heat 24 qts. of filtered water to 165 ºF.
3. Add grains and steep for 60 minutes at 154 – 156 ºF.
4. Heat  5  gallons of water to 170 ^oF in a separate pot. Sparge the grains with this water when the mash is complete.
5. Add water to the liquid collected from the grains to make up to 7 gallons and boil for 180 minutes. (You need to perform a full wort boil to get the right bitterness and character from the hops.) Add hops as per ingredient list
6. Add Irish Moss flakes and Servomyces capsule with 10 minutes remaining.
7. Cool kettle to 68 ºF with wort chiller.
8. Transfer liquid to primary fermenter.
9. Aerate cooled wort with pure oxygen for sixty seconds.
10. Pitch yeast starter.
11. Ferment at 68 ºF. till activity slows.
12. Transfer to secondary fermenter, leaving behind most of the trub.
13. Add dry hops and ferment in secondary 7 to 14 days.
14. Transfer to bottling bucket, add carbonating sugar, bottle.

Grain bill and hops:

7 Bridges Earth Day sale 15% off all organic ingredients!

Qty	Item	Total
1	Wyeast Scottish Ale, 125 ml XL	$7.00
14	Weyermann Organic Pilsner Malt, 1 Lb.	$29.96
2	Organic Rye Flakes, per Lb.	$4.42
1	Organic Corn Sugar (Dextrose), 1 Lb.	$4.17
2	Belgian Admiral Hop Pellets 2 oz.	$8.34
1	American Centennial Whole Hops 1 oz. package (2010)	$2.38
1	American Centennial Whole Hops 4 oz. (2010)	$6.38
1	American Summit Whole Hops 1 oz. (2009)	$1.90
2	American Summit Whole Hops 4 oz. (2009)	$10.20
1	American Chinook Whole Hops 4 oz. (2010)	$6.36

Subtotal                                                                                                            $81.13

Rating my Mother's Day Farmhouse Ale

Brewed this organic Seven Bridges Cooperative Richard's Farmhouse Blonde Belgian Ale (Mash-Extract) on January 17, and conditioned it in the cellar at 54 ºF for three months. 

Aroma: 8 out of 10

Appearance: 4 out of 5

Taste: 7 out of 10

Palate: 3 out of 5

Overall: 16 out of 20

Total Score: 3.8 out of 5

There are two different pours possible from this brew, one being careful to leave the yeast cake undisturbed, is a clear orange-honey-amber.  The other, allowing some of the lighter top layer of yeast to mix in with the body, is half-opaque with white cloudiness. And the beer gains a bit of flavor complexity from the stirred up yeast. 

You don't want to leave a freshly opened bottle sitting for too long, as the carbonation is very active. In a minute or two, foam will issue forth from the bottle top and erupt over the counter. Even the most careful initial pour will produce a massive off-white mousse of a head that takes some time to fade. Lacing is minimal. 

Aromas of slightly under-ripe banana, honeydew mellon, and clove, with a whiff of alcohol. And you can tell from across the room, this is going to be a great farmhouse ale. Taste is chewy fresh-baked bread, apricot, ripe white currants, cinnamon, black pepper, and faint coriander. Sparkly mouth feel and a clean fresh finish. This one took twelve weeks in the cellar to condition, and it was worth the wait.