IPA Hop Madness Mistake

Hey all. This is my first post, but I have learned a ton from this forum. Here's my IPA Hop Madness story.

Yesterday went to the LHBS to get ingredients for an IPA (Ninkasi Total Domination Clone, which I found off this site.) I realized at checkout that the recipe was for an 11 gallon batch instead of the 5 gallon I was planning on. I had 14 pounds of LME, 3.3 pounds of Munich Malt Extract, 3 pounds of Carahell and about 10 oz. of hops!

Right in line, I decided to just halve all ingredients for the brew. 7lbs of LME, 1.5lbs of Munich Malt Extract, and 1.7lbs of Carahell.

Here's where it happened. I seriously just forgot to cut the hops in half. Here is the recipe I ended up brewing.

7lbs LME
1.5 lb Munich Malt Extract
1.5 lb Carahell (steeped ~160deg. for 30 min.)
WYeast 1968 London ESB Ale
(And now the hop insanity)
1.5oz Summit 17% (60 min)
1 oz Amarillo 10.6% (30 min)
1 oz Crystal 5.6% (30 min)
1 oz Amarillo 10.6% (15 min)
1 oz Crystal 5.6% (15 min)
1 oz Centennial 10% (15 min)
1 oz Amarillo 10.6% (0 min)
1 oz Centennial 10% (0 min)

I used looseleaf hops. So when I poured the cooled wort into the carboy, it was insanely hard to get enough of it due to a lot of the liquid being drawn into the hops. I squeezed as much as I could out of them and came out with ~2.5 gallons of wort. Filled water up to 5 gallons.

Original gravity was 1.060.

It's a dark, golden color and smells pretty tasty actually. It's fermenting happily at the moment. I haven't tasted it yet, but what do you guys think? Is this going to be a face-punch of hops?

Here's what it looks like:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/28513691@N00/sets/72157625891266100/

Sounds good to me, but I'm a hop head.

until it puckers your face inside out, its ok

It'll be a very heavily hopped IPA, but it won't be undrinkable. I would like it, actually.

looks like it should be around 130-140 ibu. depends on how much you like hops, but it'll definitely let you know it has some hoppiness to it

No worries...especially with whole hops. Unless you don't like IPAs, I've tried making some real hop monsters...and I've noticed that your palate just has a set saturation point for hops (over that, and it just doesn't register).

Time to buy some bulk hops for the other half of the grain bill.

lumpher said:

looks like it should be around 130-140 ibu. depends on how much you like hops, but it'll definitely let you know it has some hoppiness to it

Click to expand...

Wow that's a lot of IBU's, almost double that of a Stone IPA!

That's one expensive brew!