8th Hoppin' DIPA w/ Pale Malt

I'm currently fermenting my first DIPA made with 9 pounds of Pale LME, 8 different types of hops, and Wyeast 1272 American Ale II that I harvested from my last IPA: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/7th-hoppin-ipa-pilsner-lme-7-hops-349183/

I used 4 gallons of 9.5 pH Kangen water (I have an ionizer from Enagic) with the following hop schedule:

60 minutes: 1/2 oz Warrior, 1/2 oz Zythos

30 minutes: 1/8 oz each (Warrior, Zythos, Sorachi Ace), 1/16 oz each (Falconers Flight, Chinook)

20 minutes: 1/4 oz Sorachi Ace, 1/8 oz each (Falconers Flight, Chinook)

15 minutes: 1/8 oz Sorachi Ace, 1/16 oz each (Falconers Flight, Chinook, Simcoe, Citra, Amarillo, Nugget)

10 minutes: 1/4 oz each (Simcoe, Citra, Amarillo, Nugget)

5 minutes: 1/4 oz each (Simcoe, Citra, Amarillo, Nugget)

2 minutes: 1/8 oz each (Simcoe, Citra, Amarillo, Nugget)

I made a 3-step 2.6 L starter with some Pilsner LME I had left from my last batch. I saved .35 L to harvest more yeast and pitched the remaining 2.25 L. Since my last batch started at 1.056 using 8.5 lbs of LME and 5 gallons of water, I figured this one would be 1.080 with 9 lbs LME and 4 gallons of water, but it ending up being 1.105 before and 1.100 after adding the 2.25 L starter, so I added another gallon of water to bring it down to 1.080. It's currently fermenting at 65 degrees. I'll check gravity in a week, but will most likely keep in primary for 2 weeks. After that I plan to ferment in secondary with dry hops for another week or two and bottle with Light DME.

The bubbling of my air-lock woke me up this morning. I'd heard about this before, but had never experienced it until now, I guess these big beers really ferment violently. I didn't have any 1/2" tubing to make a blow-off tube with the air-lock, but my racking cane fits pretty decently in my stopper, so I am using that for a blow-off tube. The temperature is also running close to 10 degrees hotter than my ambient temperature.

Not being a smart-ass but was there any reasoning behind your hop selection? I'm from the KISS school, so I have less tendency to toss in a bunch of varied hops. That said, if you have a plan for the individual contributions of the hops used, I'm intrigued.

I have 3 groups of hops, which could be broken down to bittering, flavor, and aroma. I transition between the groups at the 30 and 15 minute additions.

Warrior is a great bittering hop, but I have quite a few bittering hops that I didn't even use like Columbus, Magnum, Apollo, Bravo, and Galena. Falconers Flight and Zythos are blends, and I was really just trying to finish them off. Based on the smell I would say Falconers Flight has aroma hops like Simcoe, Amarillo, Centennial, and Cascade, while Zythos probably has those, but with maybe Columbus and Chinook as well, so I figured it would be fine to use as a bittering hop. Interestingly enough both of my bittering hops could be used for flavor and aroma as well. Dogfish Head 90, which is my favorite beer, uses Warrior throughout their 90 minute boil.

I recently ordered Sorachi Ace and Chinook, but wasn't too impressed with their aroma so I used them along with the Falconers Flight in the 30, 20, and 15 minute additions.

I definitely like Citra, Simcoe, and Amarillo for aroma hops. If I had Centennial pellets I would have used them as well, but Nugget smells pretty good so I used that. Citra is my favorite hop, Simcoe is my 2nd favorite. Dogfish Head 90 uses Simcoe and Amarillo. And Stone IPA, which is my 2nd favorite beer, uses Centennial. At this point I'm pretty sold on using Citra, Simcoe, and Centennial for IPAs, and the Simcoe/Amarillo combination is pretty common in many IPAs that I really like.

Interestingly enough, in addition to the whole Citra and Simcoe I plan to dry hop with, I also plan to use whole Centennial and Cascade, so this beer will actually use 10 different hops. Once I finish off the Cascade, I might replace it with Amarillo in my dry hop mix though.

I'm still experimenting with my malts at this point. I'm targeting 100 IBUs and using all high quality hops, so that always turns out fine even if I'm using the kitchen sink of hops. While I have a good handle on my flavor/aroma hops, at some point I'm going to have to experiment with all those different bittering hops I have, maybe do some 1 gallon or even 48 oz batches so I can do 3 at a time and compare them head to head. Once I figure that out then I'll have to start experimenting with different yeasts.

I'm sure it will turn out really good, even if overkill on hop variety. Should be a massive hop-bomb 'o flavor.

Gravity is only down to 1.035 and there isn't much activity. Temperature is 67, so I'll up it to 70 and shake it around, but I think I have a stuck fermentation. I have a little of the Wyeat 1272 I banked as well as 11g of US-04, and my friend has some WLP099 Super High Gravity Ale Yeast, but I think my best option would be to get a yeast cake from him. I also heard of people using alpha-amylase, but from my understanding alpha-amylase just breaks down unfermentables so the yeast can do it's thing, and since I used all LME, I don't see how there could be that many unfermentables. I just think my washed Wyeast 1272 crapped out after ABV went above 6%, so I assume if I can get some strong active yeast in there, it will get the job done.

I ended up getting a yeast cake from a my friend from a 1.045 OG dark beer with 2 packets of Nottingham Ale Yeast and pitched my beer on top of it. I think I should have been a little more patient though because my gravity was down to 1.026 after a little over 2 more days at 69 degrees, so it's possible it could have been under 1.020 by the time I was ready to rack to secondary (I'm shooting for 1.016). I also think my friend might have had a higher fermentation temperature because it had that apple smell I heard Nottingham yeast could get if temperatures go above 70. Hopefully that flavor won't transfer over to my beer. I lowered my temperature to try to get it down to 65 degrees. As long as it doesn't start fermenting too hard, hopefully it won't go into a range that produces apple smell. Of course by the time everything is done with secondary fermentation, dry-hopping, and carbonating, it could be fine. If not, I'll just know to be a little more patient with my high OG beers in the future.

Gravity is down to 1.016. It doesn't have the apple smell, but I think it picked up some of the flavor from the dark beer that the yeast cake was from. I plan to rack to secondary and dry hop in the next day or two.

I transferred to secondary. Gravity was down to 1.014. Dry hopping 3+ gallons (3 gallon Better Bottle filled almost to the air-lock stopper) with 1/2 oz Citra, 1/4 oz Simcoe, 1/4 oz Centennial, 1/4 oz Cascade, and 3/8 oz Amarillo pellets. Also using two 1.5 L glass bottles, one with a similar dry hop mix and one without dry hops. Plan to bottle in 7-10 days.

Cold crashed tonight. Plan to bottle tomorrow.

Bottled with cane sugar, trying to hit 2.3 volumes of CO2 based on this calculator: http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/recipator/carbonation.html

The beer turned out good. At 9+% ABV I actually think it could have used more hops because it didn't have as strong of a hop flavor as my last IPA which was around 6%. It also ended up having some dark beer characteristics that I think it got from the yeast cake.

Yes. You could have used a lot more hops. I added up all of your additions and, excluding the dry hopping... it comes out to only 5 Oz total in the beer. That's certainly fine for, say, a 5.5% or 6% single IPA. But for this big of a beer, as you noted, 9% alcohol is a lot to stand up to, and I think your hops might have gotten lost en route to taste bud delivery.

(Just to be clear, since this is the Internet and you can't hear my tone of voice, I'm just talking matter-of-factly, that is all. I am *not* trying to imply you Did Things Wrong or am disgusted with you or anything like that. K? K. Moving on.)

What I would have done is...

- First off, 1/16oz additions need to go away. I can see blending 1/8oz - or better yet, 1/4 oz - of many hops together to get a complex flavor profile, but I think that unless you're doing Gallon, or 2-gallon batches, 1/16oz is probably too wee, too insignificant to really make a difference in flavor.

- Second, let's look at the total amount of each hop. Excluding the dry hopping... You used 0.625oz Warrior, 0.625oz Zythos, 0.5 oz Sorachi, 0.25oz Falconer, 0.25oz Chinook, 0.6875oz Simcoe, 0.6875oz Citra, 0.6875oz Amarillo, and 0.6875oz Nugget. That's a lot of oddball numbers, but you didn't use over a single ounce of any one hop. At those levels (and in this strong of a beer), this tells me no single hop variety is going to "cut through" the big malty background and shine.

- So... how to do it differently?? I'm going to assume, for a moment, that you had a full 1.0oz package of each hop in inventory to work with. So, I came up with this.
60 Minutes: 1/2oz Warrior, 1/2oz Zythos = 1.00oz
30 Minutes: Eliminate entirely
20 Minutes: 1/2oz Zythos, 1/4oz Warrior, 1/4oz Nugget = 1.00oz
15 Minutes: 1/4oz each (Chinook, Sorachi Ace, Falconer, Nugget) = 1.00oz
10 Minutes: 1/2oz Nugget, 1/4oz each (Falconer, Chinook, Simcoe, Citra, Amarillo) = 1.75oz
5 Minutes: 1/4oz each (Sorachi Ace, Falconer, Chinook, Simcoe, Citra, Amarillo, Centennial, Cascade) = 2.00oz
2 Minutes: 1/2oz Sorachi Ace, 1/4oz each (Chinook, Falconer, Simcoe, Citra, Amarillo, Centennial, Cascade) = 2.00oz
Dry Hop: 0.5oz each (Centennial, Cascade) plus 0.25oz each (Simcoe, Citra, Amarillo) = 1.75oz
Total = 10.75oz Hops for 9% ABV beer

Okay, now let's take a look at that hop schedule in an actual recipe, to see how software thinks our IBU will look. Now, things get hairy here because I could not get your numbers to line up right, using 9# LME, I get an OG way down in the 1.067 range. I basically faked the recipe to get it to come out to 1.080 as you measured - I used a batch size of 5.0 gal and then added 11# of Pilsen LME to get OG 1.079 / FG 1.020 which is close to what you reported - although your FG finished a lot drier. So just take that into consideration when looking at IBU, These numbers are definitely approximate, since you saw strange gravity readings and diluted accordingly. (Of course, for the sake of trying to make math easier, I also ignored the dry-hopping in multiple secondary vessels.)

Now, I admit, I stopped editing the software-based recipe after adding all of the 5 minute additions, for two reasons: 1, it's very tedious to add that many different hops, and 2, it won't make a large impact on our calculated IBU.

But, with the above hop schedule (and ASSUMING 1.079 OG, and ASSUMING a full 5.0 gallons of boil volume), I come up with a lip-tingling 115 IBU.

In terms of hop usage (not IBU's though!) here is my hop addition "math" just for reference:

(I took away 0.25oz of Warrior after having taken this screenshot, it should be total of 0.75oz Warrior and 10.75 oz total hops.)

All in all, though, it sounds like you created a pretty tasty Double IPA and with a little caressing of your hop bill & timing, I think it can only get better from here!

As far as the 1/16 oz additions, if you add everything up, you'll see that I was using a 1/2 oz total for Falconers Flight and Chinook, but I should have used more Simcoe, Citra, Amarillo, and Nugget. I used 7 oz of hops on my last batch, but used 2 oz of those hops in the last 2 minutes, probably should have done the same this time. I did an original calculation with 4 gallons for this batch and ended up getting 110 IBU with the 5 oz of hops I used, so I thought that was enough. I just re-calculated it, changing the final batch size to 5 gallons (since I added another gallon of water later to knock it down to 1.080) calculates to 74 IBU, definitely not enough for major hop flavor in a 9+% IPA. so I think that was what it was. I didn't expect to have to add that gallon of water at the end. I'm not sure how I ended up with an OG of 1.105 with a 4 gallon boil of 9 lbs. LME, unless the volume went down to 3.2 gallons. However adding the 2.25 starter only brought it down to 1.100, and there was only about 0.7 lbs of LME in the starter, so it really doesn't make sense. To have 4 gallons at 1.100 drop to 1.080 at 5 gallons, I should have had 10.8 lbs of LME. If I had 9.7 lbs of LME, to drop from 1.100 to 1.080, I should have gone from 3.6 to 4.5 gallons, which would have meant I should have had 3 gallons that measured 1.111 OG before adding the starter. While I don't think I needed 10 oz of hops (way too much trub), I definitely needed more than 5 oz since I had to add that extra gallon of water. Until I did that calculation I didn't realize how much a partial boil cuts IBUs.

AHHHH Thank you for clarifying. I did not realize it was supposed to be 4 gallons and got adjusted to 5 due to the gravity issues - I thought you had intended for 5 gal all along. And as such, my hop schedule assumed 5 gal post-boil, 6-ish-whatever gal pre-boil.

My bad, your original recipe makes more sense now. I do think that in general, it needed more late hops, especially not coming from Nugget or Warrior or Zythos, but from all of the aroma/flavor hops you listed earlier.
In fact, of the three bittering varieties, I would be tempted to lose one entirely - just Nugget & Warrior, or just Warrior & Zythos, etc. - in order to give you more room for late-addition hops from 15 minutes onward. But it is true that I never drop into measuring 1/16oz of hops, I pretty much stick to 1/4oz as a minimum addition for any single variety. (Okay, maybe 1/8oz of each variety if I want to make a micro-managed hop schedule to simulate continuous hopping.)

And it is very true, partial boil vs. full boil can change the hop utilization drastically.
I think that, as you also mentioned, whatever caused you to experience weird gravity/volume issues and thus caused you to correct the beer via dilution, is the culprit behind "throwing off" the hop profile you expected to get from this beer.