A moron doing a 120 min clone

So I have always been fascinated with DFH really high gravity beers (120 min IPA, world wide stout, rais extra) and have always really wanted to try making one but was not confident enough in my brewing tech. Now I have made a ton of improvements in temp control, pitch rate, mashes etc. and I decided to try one this weekend.

Basically I am ripping off homebrew chef http://www.homebrewchef.com/120minuteIPArecipe.html.

I am going to do a 150f 2 step mash (I dont see a need for decoct), 120 min boil adding hops every three min, plenty of wyeast yeast nutrient. Im shooting for a OG around 1.100, pump pure O2 and dump a 4L starter of WL american ale yeast.

That will ferment for about 5 days while I add 12oz corn sugar and aerate with O2 every twelve hours (I dont have anything else to do, Im a grad student, its thanksgiving break, and Im sure as **** not going home).

After five days, transfer to secondary (SG should be around 1.025) and dump another 4L starter, this time of WL super high gravity yeast. Then I am going to add a 1/2oz of hops every 12 hours along with the 12oz of sugar.

Ill just keep doing that until it looks like fermentation is going to stop (either way ill finish adding dry hops until I get all six ounces in there). I am shooting for an ABV of 20%, but I have no idea what to expect, so if it stops fermenting, oh well, Ill stop adding sugar.

So thats the plan, I will post a formal brew sheet in a day or so when I write it up. The starters are already on there way. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Ben

Interesting idea on staggering your dry hop additions.

If you dry hop before fermentation has completely subsided, the co2 will scrub your hop resins right out of the vessel. Ideally a brew like DFH 120 you want the most amount of hop forward flavor/scent you can get. Just a heads up...i haven't actually experienced the effects.

I'm assuming you listened to the Can You Brew It episode, but if you didn't you should because they just did this beer in the same way.

+1 to giving a listen to the Jamil Show can you brew it. They just did this one like a week or two ago. In fairness I listened to the show, and they had the recipe from the brewer, and if you want to get it right it is a mother****er of a process. Pretty much what you have already documented. All kinds of craziness including many sugar additions during fermentation.

Cudos to you adventuresome spirit!

HopheadNJ said:

If you dry hop before fermentation has completely subsided, the co2 will scrub your hop resins right out of the vessel. Ideally a brew like DFH 120 you want the most amount of hop forward flavor/scent you can get. Just a heads up...i haven't actually experienced the effects.

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Thanks for the advice, Im using the timeline as a guideline mostly, I will see how active it is and let it slow before I dry hop.

As far as Jamil's show goes, I didn't listen to it but thats where I got the idea from. I regularly use his website and there was a link to it. Heres the recipe I am using, it is hard to calculate exact numbers with this recipe due to all the unusual techs.

Batch size: 5.5 gal
OG: Hopefully 1.190
FG: Probably 1.048 or so
Color: 7 SRM
IBU: Hard to calculate, prolly 150 or so
Brewhouse efficiency: 75%

Malts/adjuncts:
20 lbs American 2-row (69%)
.5 lbs crystal 20 (2%)
8.5 lbs corn sugar (29%)

Hops:
Mix 1.5 oz each of centennial, cascade, bravo together. Split up into 40 parts. Add one every 3 minutes of the 120 minute boil.

Mix 1 oz each of centennial, cascade, bravo together. Split up into 24 parts, and add every day to the secondary when ferm slows.

Mash:
Mash in at 150f for 75min. (1 tsp 5.2 mash ph buffer)
Mash out at 168f for 15min.
Sparge at 170f

Boil:
120 minute boil
add supermoss and yeast nutrient last 15 of boil.
Should be about SG 1.11 after boil before sugar additions

Primary:
Aerate with pure O2 before pitching, and once a day for first five days
Pitch 4L decanted starter of WLP American Ale
Add .5 lbs corn sugar every 12 hours until fermentation slows too much or OG is recalculated to 1.190, whichever comes first. (this continues in the secondary)

Secondary:
When the WL american ale yeast has done some work, pitch a 4L decanted starter of WL super high gravity yeast
When fermentation slows, add 1/8 oz of hop mix every day for 24 days.

Tertiary:
Transfer the beer off of all the sludge and hops and whatever else is growing in there. Let it age for a long ass time.

Again, let me give credit where it is due, this is almost a direct rip off of the recipe on the homebrewchef's site which Jamil had a hand in. If you haven't already, check out mrmalty.com, lots of cool ****, the guys a genius.

So please, give me all the advise, criticism and insults you can.

Thanks,
Ben

Also, I made a bit of a change to the grain/sugar ratio. They (homebrewchef and jamil) used 16 lbs of grain and almost 11 lbs of corn sugar. I figure I want to get as much of the sugar from the grain as is reasonable, so I adjusted the recipe to use more grain (20lbs) , less sugar (8.5lbs) but still hit the same abv (20%). any problems with that?

24 days is a long time to leave dry hops in. You might want to reduce that to 14 days to avoid grassy flavors.

Also, the reason one would want to use simple sugars instead of grains, is that attenuation is going to be a huge concern when making this beer. If your OG is 1.200, and you get 70% apparent attenuation, your FG will be 1.060. No one's going to want to drink that hop-flavored cough syrup.

maskednegator said:

24 days is a long time to leave dry hops in. You might want to reduce that to 14 days to avoid grassy flavors.

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Good call, then I might just double the amount added every day and cut the number of days in half.

maskednegator said:

Also, the reason one would want to use simple sugars instead of grains, is that attenuation is going to be a huge concern when making this beer. If your OG is 1.200, and you get 70% apparent attenuation, your FG will be 1.060. No one's going to want to drink that hop-flavored cough syrup.

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No kidding, as I said I am going to add sugar until ferm slows. I am confident I can dry our a beer that was initially 1.11, and I am not as worried about hitting 20% as I am making a palatable beer.

You should really listen to the podcast, at least the back half of it. They talked about problematic areas that they felt could be tweaked to make the recipe more friendly. There was a lot of talk about alternate ways/schedules to do the sugar additions.

I know for certain they talked aout the hop additions. Although they did not try doing this, there was a general consensus (in theory) that rather than 40 hop additions at 3 minute intervals, they would combine them into perhaps 10 additions at 12 minute intervals to make it more manageable. They all agreed that you should be able to achieve a very similiar result without having to toss hops in every 3 minutes.

So you may be able to get some time and labor saving tips that have already been scrubbed by 3 master home brewers.

I listened to the BN podcast and was thinking about trying to brew this someday. It seems to me that a difficulty in the fermentation process is knowing when the yeast is gonna poop out and not adding too much sugar after that point. You might want to decrease the sugar additions to 6 or 4 oz. toward the end of fermentation. That way you won't end up with 12 oz of unfermented sugar in the beer.