Back in the Game again! Galaxy/Simcoe/Citra IPA

After getting a new solid job finally, I have moved up to Michigan in September of last year. Took a couple handfuls of trips back and forth to get my stuff up here for brewing(which I brought up after Thanksgiving weekend). Finally got pretty comfortable and settled in and ready to go. Of course it is an apartment, so I have to deal with using a stove top, but it isn't that bad really. I went ahead and got a really nice Aluminum stock pot off Amazon for around 50 bucks and I boiled water in it the night before I brewed to get the oxide layer going on. It is a good height as to not hit my vent top over my stove, and it is 10 gallons in capacity(perfect for All Grain which is coming up very soon for me). Another plus is that there is a highly respected homebrew shop 9 minutes from my apartment in Waterford. They always have a fantastic selection of supplies, which is surprising seeing as I am basically in the outskirts of the metro area. They had an incredible selection of hops which is why this IPA has these varieties. Also have a nice homebrew club which I am joining soon officially. I already went to one meeting haha.

Anyways here is the recipe:

• 7 lb Muntons DME - Extra Light (3.0 SRM)
• 1 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt - 10L (10 SRM)
• 1 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt - 20L (20 SRM)
• .5 oz Warrior (60 min)
• .75 oz Simcoe (15 min)
• .75 oz Citra leaf (15 min)
• .75 oz Galaxy (15 min)
• .25 oz Simcoe (3 min)
• .25 oz Citra leaf (3 min)
• .25 oz Galaxy (3 min)
• .5 oz Warrior (3 min)
• 2 ounce Citra Leaf (Dry Hop 7 days)
• 1 Whirlfloc (15 min)
• 1 Pkgs WLP001 - California Ale Yeast (3000 ml starter)
• According to BrewTarget:
• 65 IBU
• 7.5 SRM
• 7% ABV
• Actual results: 1.068 OG; 1.017 FG

I got a bit of critique on this after I bought the ingredients, but I rolled with it anyways(something about too much caramel malt). I will probably opt for carapils and a small amount of darker crystal next time. The large volume of crystal will probably add some body(which is not a bad thing though). So this will still be a great beer.



Started off pretty basic as usual, with one exception. I checked a water sample test from the city of Waterford online, and it showed some pretty high concentrations of calcium and sodium. So I just went ahead and bought some cheap jugs of water from Meijer, and used those for everything except my yeast starter, which was made 2 days earlier. I steeped the grains and and then let the bag drip off a bit, but did not rinse them with hot water like I have with other batches. Not necessary being that this is extract brewing.



Took about an hour to get to a boil, but not too bad overall. After the boil got rolling, I added the Warrior and set my timer and relaxed after that. Plenty of headroom in the kettle, along with the fact that the boil was not violent at all, meant that I had nothing to worry about with boiling over. I checked the temp in the kettle and it was about 210 the whole time. So my crappy resistance stove was doing a fine job, and I likely got good hop utilization out of my brew day.



There is the entirety of my aroma edition at 15 minutes. The leaf hops definitely take up a bulk of the space, and they also float on top when I threw them in, but a good couple stirs of the wort, and they were doing just fine. I threw in a whirlfloc along with those hops, and then my chiller. At a few minutes left I just dumped the remainder of my hops into the kettle for aroma addition. Then chilled it down with my faucet in about a half hour. Not too shabby. I then poured my entire kettle straight into the fermenter bucket, with a sanitized paint straining bag I got at the homebrew store. Got a ton of the hops out of it, and left a lot less trub when I racked it to secondary than when I bread the Arrogant Bastard with 4 ounces of hops. Some break material made it in the pot, and someone suggested on my YT channel that I should siphon it out with a whirlpool. I may do that next time and use a strainer to get aeration of my wort for pitching. I then pitched the decanted starter as usual. About 80F when I did so, so not that bad at all.



Pretty clear gravity sampling going on. I am planning on investing in a refractometer off ebay really soon to make less of a hassle with my gravity readings. I can just use the adjustment calculations to find FG and it will be quite a bit more accurate to read as well.



White labs didn't fail, for the 4th time around. Blow off in about 12 hours. I will probably use a smaller starter from now on, unless I am brewing an insane RIS at 1.125 or something(I dread the day it comes, my bucket will probably blow up). Some reading on HBT reveals that a 1L or 1.5L should be plenty for a 1.070 beer like this one.



Dry hopping went just fine. I brewed this the Wednesday before Christmas holiday and let it ferment over that break alone in my apartment in a cool closet where my furnace sits. It sits around 60-65 in there and my furnace was off, so nothing to worry about. I racked it in the carboy, and let it settle for a full day before pouring 2 ounces of leaf Citra into a mountain in the carboy. I woke up the yeast after racking it, and there was a small bit of krausen that kind of looked like an infection at first glance haha. But all was fine and I dry hopped with no worries. Upon racing to the bottle bucket, I only got a small amount of leaves in there, and my beer turned out extremely clear! I pulled about 4.5 gallons out(acceptable with all the leaf hops in there) so I got 47 bottles out of this. I used 110g of corn sugar to prime it. There was very little beer left over when I cleaned the carboy, so I did a good job of racking off secondary. I saved up all of the bottles from this batch by myself, a portion of old bottles from the last batch, and some ones I got from drinking and rating brews. I always rinsed out the bottles when I was done so there was very little if any crap in them when I went to bottle. I used a bottle brush if there was anything. I got some empty case boxes from the beer store and saved some 6 pack holders to make my own cases for this as well. The vinator did a good job as usual, and I just let them sit for a bit in my empty dishwasher as I bottled. No water on the floor, other than some beer drippings from my bottle wand. All in all a good batch, and I can't wait to see how it turns out in a few weeks!



Made a brewing video again. This time used Movie Maker to encode to 720p(even though my camera is not 720p it still makes a good video).



Cheers!