JohnG's Homebrew: Crimson King: A deep red malty 130 IBU 9% ABV Imperial IPA

Hail the Crimson King!

I've thrown myself into brewing full force lately and after brewing up about 10 batches (mostly all grain) from kits, I decided it was time to brew up my own recipe. I'm a die-hard fan of IPAs and have really been enjoying double and Imperial IPAs so I've decided to go with what I know and love for my first homegrown all grain recipe. Yea yea, I know, everyone says to brew more simple beers whilst learning the ropes of brewing but I'm not one to listen to such sage advise and must make all those mistakes on my own:) Hey, for my penance I will drink every last drop of what I brew, minus what I can give away to my friends, those suckers, foolish suckers.

IPAs tend to be on the lighter side, but I always find myself craving a bit more maltiness in my brew. So, I've decided to make a Red Imperial IPA with some crystal 120L and chocolate malt to give me a brew with a little more caramel backbone and a reddish color running at around 14 SRM. Being a fan of Stephen King, I just had to name it Crimson King. I wanted to go big on aroma hops (8 oz of dry hops), so I decided to counter all that aroma with a whopping dose of bitterness.. almost 130 IBU!!!!! This brew recipe will surely be a king with all those hops and a smooth 9% ABV. I really like Hopageddon, which has 144 IBU and loads of hop aroma so decided to go for it with this brew.

Below is a screenshot of the recipe on Brewtoad, You can find it here.

MASH

All mash and sparge water was treated with filtration through activated carbon and a campden tablet. Added 175F strike water to 149F for 45 min, which after stirring dropped to 143F. Added 1 gal of boiling water to 155F. At 60 min the temp was 150F, and at 80 min 148F. Added 1 gal of boiling water to 155F and 1 tsp of gypsum. At 100 min the conversion looked complete so added 2 gal boiling water to 165F for mash out. Recirculated 3 gal quick then slower for 10 more min. Lautered the wort into the boil pot, with continuous sparging until I reached 7.75 gallons in the pot. Also did a second runnings and collected 3 gallons.

BOIL- 75 min

Boiled 15 min before first hop addition, 2 oz Chinook. Columbus at 30 and 10 min before end of boil. Added whirlfloc and 1 lb corn sugar at 10 min. Cooled with immersion chiller 45 min... the chiller is really slow since the tap water here is so warm. OG 1.085

Second runings. Boiled 60 min. 0.5 oz palisade hops and 60 and 10 min in boil. 1/2lb corn sugar and whirlfloc at 10 min. Chilled to 70F in 25min. OG 1.043.

FERMENTATION

Poured cooled wort into a carboy, let settle for 2 hours, then siphoned to another carboy, but still pulled in an inch of trub (there was a ton!). Made a 2.5L starter with two packages US-05, stirred on stir plate for about 24 hr at 69F, then cold crashed overnight in fridge, warmed to room temp then pitched into the carboy. Fermentation went strong for a week, starting at at 70F and varying as low as 66F (avg 68F), then slowed and temp dropped to 64F and fluctuated between that and 68F for about a week. At two weeks FG was 1.016, so 9.0% alcohol.

Dry hopped directly into the primary 6 oz (2 cascade and 4 centennial). The brew tastes like SN bigfoot barely wine, very balanced and no off flavors. The dry hops should bring it back from barely wine territory into the realm of Imperial IPA, I hope. Otherwise, it will be a good hoppy barely wine:) I shook the carboy once a day for the first 3 days of the dry hop to make sure the hops mixed well with the beer as the whole hops are floaters... think next time I'll use the whole hops in the boil and the pellets in the dry hop. On day 4 of the dry hop, I sampled the brew and it just wasn't hoppy enough, so I added 2 oz more of cascade pellets. I wanted to experiment with dry hopping on the yeast cake, but I think the flavor I'm looking for is more prominent with less yeast around to modify the hop aroma. That said, there was still a lot of yeast in suspension so the flavor may develop once the yeast has dropped out. After six days total of dry hopping, I bottled (114 g of corn sugar for priming in 3.9 gal of 2.8 vol of CO2). The whole hops made it very difficult to siphon the beer and I got lots of yeast and hops in the bottles. In hind sight, I should have racked to a secondary for a day of settling, or even better, not use whole hops for the dry hop. Let the bottles carb at ~68F for 2 weeks then into the fridge.

The flavor of this beer has changed considerably from the secondary to the bottle before the fridge to after two weeks in the fridge. At first it had a malty backbone similar to SN bigfoot, then that smoothed out into a more caramel flavor in the bottle, and after two weeks at 32F the cold haze has cleared and the backbone has lightened up, letting the hop aroma and bitterness come through... a little bit. The beer has a very caramely smell to it and the malt backbone is so big that it almost too perfectly balances the hop aroma so that it's hard to perceive.... until you burp up a blast of cascade aroma! It's still fairly young for such a big beer so we'll see how it tastes when the beer flavor finally stabilizes. It's a good beer but the volume of the malt and the hops is turned way up, making it more of a dessert than anything else. I think I might make another toned down version of this, dropping the corn sugar and honey malt, dialing the IBUs to 100 and the dry hop to 4 oz.

Second runnings fermentation:

Poured the whole chilled boil into a 5 gallon carboy and pitched 100ml of the starter above. Fermented between 66 and 68F for a few days. Two weeks in primary, FG 1.003. Bottled a case with 55g of corn sugar. Put in the fridge after 2.5 weeks in the bottle and the chill haze cleared out in two weeks. Tastes like PBR... too lite for my tastes but not a bad session beer for a hot day at the lake.

The Beer