Excellent (So far) CDA Recipe

I know a lot of people are starting to play around with the CDA style. I brewed this one up 2 weeks ago and racked it to secondary yesterday. After tasting the sample I was so tempted to feed the siphon hose to my mouth and go to town. I'm really looking forward to trying this in a month. Hopefully this will help others formulate recipes for the emerging style.

looks good to me. I find that Nottingham if fermented too warm can have a very fruity aroma. Columbus is a really austere hop to dry hop with! You have some hair on your chest after a pint of dry hopped columbus beer.

I checked out your CDA #3 thread. It looks like ours are fairly similar. I think I'll use 8oz more Carafa II Special next time, but it may be too soon to judge. Widmer W'10 is my favorite CDA so far, followed closely by Barley Brown Turmoil and Hopworks Succession. Widmer leans towards being roasty while the others are very much dominated by hops. I've had pretty good results with Nottingham in the past, but I tried US-05 in an Imperial Stout I brewed yesterday. I'm curious how well it will do at a slightly higher temp (~72-75)

Making a roastless CDA is like adding food coloring, though making one too roasty and you start getting into porter, stout and american brown territory. Sure there are people making a brown base and hopping the hell out of it and calling it IBA, but that is different.

All that is leading to me just saying that using more carafa could work, but you might need to rework your timing a little bit. I figured out with my brew partner that we are going to add more carafa for less time, or less carafa for more time. We don't mind the roast that we are getting, but we are right now chasing less roast and more color utilizing grains. I also just found out as I mentioned above that columbus late in the boil isn't for me. It is a very dominant flavor that both of us noticed yesterday when we tasted it prior to dry hopping.

So maybe keep the 1lb Carafa for the whole mash and add 8oz more for the last 25 minutes or so? Will the starches still be converted that late?

Yeah, Columbus is prolly not for everyone. The biggest lesson I've learned with using it for late additions/dry hopping is to let the beer condition in the bottle/keg for at least a month, preferably two months. The Columbus flavors will mellow slightly producing a GREAT experience.

For starters, I am most confident that dark roasted malts don't give you any starch. Next is that do you care with 8oz? If you have a good process then you won't have starch haze or anything like that.

On hoppy beers I am out of them by two months from brew date The longest I have aged a hoppy beer is for 4 months and that was only because I found a bottle in the back of a case that I had forgotten. So Columbus hasn't had a chance to mellow for me yet. My Barleywine though used it for the entire bittering addition.

Cracked open a few bottle of this and... WOW. It's exactly what I was going for. I really wouldn't change anything. The hop aroma and flavor is perfect. Excellent aftertaste too. I really need to do a 10 gallon batch of this. Delicious!

Maybe a dumb question, but why are you boiling for 90 minutes with a first hop addition at 60 minutes? Does that serve a purpose other than evaporate more wort off?