Brewers Best California Imperial Pale Ale

Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
It's all good. I didn't either. I just figured this was still a good place to talk about this kit, that way when strangers online go searching for info about it, they wont have to bounce from thread to thread.
 
amingo said:
Assuming we are talking about the BB Imperial Pale Ale, I brewed up a batch a couple Saturdays ago and man did it ferment!

Lag time was about 10 hours and produced a 3-inch krausen within 2 days. I had it in a carbouy and it was so turbulent it looked like it was boiling! Settled down on day 5 and was already within the specified FG range so I tasted it and decided to transfer to secondary and dry hop it for a nice dose of aroma.

Pretty much followed the recipe on this one except for the following:
- 5-gallon boil (4-gallon steep of specialty grains for 30 min plus a 1-gallon "sparge" of grain bag – slowly poured hot water over grain bag to extract as much of the sugars as possible.
- rehydrated the Safale US-05 in one cup 95-degree water for 20 minutes prior to pitching.
- dry-hopped with 2oz Citra

- OG 1.086
- Day 5 gravity 1.015
- Approx ABV 9.3%

Can't wait to taste this one!

Update: Stole a sample after a week of dry hopping and it tastes great. I could drink this stuff right out of the secondary! Citra dry hopping gave a nice, mellow aroma.
 
I've got 4 12oz bottles left and I brewed it about 3-4 months ago it's all I can do not to drink those. I tried one the other night and it ended up being exactly like I wanted. Really pungent stuff.

I'm seriously thinking of getting another kit of this for my next brew, after I do this AHS yeti kit I have. It'd be interesting to brew the same beer twice, once as my 3rd brew and again as my 11th to see if I got any better at it.

I saw a 7 gallon turkey fryer on clearance at wal-mart an hour ago for $45, but I live in an apartment so there's no way I could get it. So it's stovetop only for now.
 
Extract brews are pretty hard for the human to screw up. I would imagine a much bigger variation of taste coming from yeast, temps, time in primary, etc. There are lots of variables, few of which brewers can easily control. Boiling a wort at a specific gravity and adding hops at the prescribed times are some of the few.
 
Back
Top