Regular IPA, Cascade Amarillo.

Hey there folks,

I've been brewing for nearly a year now, but mostly crazy stuff (the "I'm sure this could go into a brew" phase). Now I want to try my hand on something more classic; an american IPA. This recipe should not come as a surprise, except if I missed something, which is entirely possible. Any comment is welcome!

I'm aiming for crisp and powerful.


Thanks!

Fairly high gravity for a regular IPA. Cascade's a great choice and also works well in single hop variety beers.

I've been having some good success with WLP007 in my toe tag IPA, which can handle higher gravity wort. It's a monster yeast with a fast ferment and good floc characteristics, and can handle up to about 10% abv. I pitch two bottles per 6 gallon batch into my toe tag with well aerated wort and a small amount of yeast nutes. It burns through most ales at 67 degrees in 3-4 days and I let it sit another week while I dry hop on the yeast cake to eat up any fusel alcohols or diacetyls. WLP001 is also a great classic choice for most American style IPA's, or you can use something more assertive like pacman yeast.

For your beer, i'd definitely use some yeast nutrients to help them chew up all of those sugars, keep my wort temps on the low side during the mash (145-150f) and use a teaspoon of irish moss at 10 mins left on the boil. Your hops schedule looks fine and your grain bill looks like it'll have a nice amount of body and depth without competing too much with the hops.

looks pretty good as is other than the yeast. I'd go with WLP 1, 2, 7 or Wyeast 1450.

Thanks for the comments; much appreciated!

I'd either use Munich or Vienna, not both. The Carapils is not necessary here either. Mash around 152 F. You may want to invest in a high alpha bittering hop so you can use 1 oz. of it, instead of 2.6 oz. of precious Amarillo. You'll also have to strain out less kettle hops. It can be a pain in the butt if you overload your kettle with hops, especially leaf hops. Refocus the 20/10 min additions to offer more at 10 min. The 5 min addition is pointless; shift it to flameout with the rest. Lastly, I would leave the dryhop in for double the time.