Legendary Oaked IIPA

Grain
12.00 lb Light Dry Extract (8.0 SRM) Dry Extract 19.67 %
1.25 lb Victory Malt (25.0 SRM) Grain 8.20 %
0.50 lb Pale Malt, Maris Otter (3.0 SRM) Grain 3.28 %
0.25 lb Special B Malt (180.0 SRM) Grain 1.64 %

Hops in Boil
1.00 oz Columbus (Tomahawk) [17.40 %] (90 min) Hops 19.7 IBU
0.50 oz Columbus (Tomahawk) [16.80 %] (89 min) Hops 9.5 IBU
2.00 oz Crystal [3.50 %] (2 min) Hops 0.6 IBU
2.00 oz Chinook [14.40 %] (2 min) Hops 2.6 IBU
1.00 oz Simcoe [11.90 %] (2 min) Hops 0.5 IBU

Dry Hops
2.00 oz Amarillo Gold [8.50 %] (Dry Hop 7 days) Hops -
1.00 oz Simcoe [11.90 %] (Dry Hop 7 days) Hops -
2.00 oz Crystal [3.50 %] (Dry Hop 35 days) Hops -
2.00 oz Simcoe [11.90 %] (Dry Hop 35 days) Hops -

Oak Aging
3.00 oz Medium Toast Oak Cubes that had been aging in your favorite scotch/whisky/bourbon for the primary fermentation age.

Misc
1.00 items Servomyces (Boil 10.0 min) Misc (maybe use 2?)
1.00 items Whirlfloc Tablet (Boil 5.0 min) Misc
1 Pkgs Super High Gravity Ale (White Labs #WLP099) Yeast-Ale

Starter
1.00 lbs Extra Light DME into 2L
1.00 items Servomyces

During the Boil
Steep at 156 for 45 minutes, continually stirring and doing a little teabagging action for draining. Add Light DME into boil gradually over the length of the boil to prevent too much carmelization.

Primary Fermentation
WLP099 seems to be a slooow fermenter @68f. Krauzen was just starting to drop after 3 weeks but the airlock was slowly bubbling away (one bubble every 5-6 seconds) when I racked it at week 4. I probably would use an extra Servomyces pill for more nutrients and maybe let the starter build up longer.

Secondary Fermentation
You should have about 5.5 gallons when the primary ferm finishes out, which is a bit more than you can fit in a 5 gal carboy! Thats the idea.
Rack off 1 gallon to a 1gal (or other sized) carboy and add your oak cubes and the liquor if you want, this is your oak carboy.
Rack the rest into your secondary carboy (your hop carboy) and add your first dry hopping. After a few weeks add your final dry hops.

Cold crash & blending
Cold crash these guys and rack them both together (you should lose about a half gallon from hop absorption, so you could go into a 5 gal corny) and let them blend for about 2-3 days, then bottle and let age for about 4 weeks.
Alternatively you could cold crash then blend into a corny for kegging, CO2 it up and let it age.


Tasting
My initial tasting impressions during sampling was this beer was going to be epic.
I just opened a bottle last night which was a little shy of 4 weeks in the bottle and it was very good, moderate bitterness with huge hop floral/green aroma and flavor, balanced by some smoothness from the oak.
I think it needs about 3-4 more weeks before it starts to really hit its stride, but it made a very favorable impression with my buddies who tasted it as well.

dude this is 17.5%...jesus! Hows the alcohol bite and is it thick at all? mouthfeel etc

I think your math is off a bit, ABV should be 12.25. Alcohol bite was barely noticeable. The big hop aroma with faint oakiness, and the smoothness of the beer (I feel Victory is a smooth malt flavor) barely make it noticable. WLP099's yeast character might mask it some as well, I've never used it before.

yea i plugged 1.151 into promash by mistake... oops. ok thats a bit more managable. looks good.

Popped one of these yesterday thanks to a beer swap through Soper. Thanks!

Aroma: some hops, but the hop aroma has faded considerably, I mostly get malt and bready character from the Victory malt. Next time around I would recommend leaving all of the dry hops in for a month, I think you will get a stronger aroma out of them.

Body/mouthfeel: very rich, reminds me a lot of Dogfish Head 90. Plenty of malt body to hold up to the hops. Nice firm brown head. Consider using 5-10% sugar to lighten the body just a little bit.

Flavor: a rich, malt focused IIPA. While I feel it could use a little more hop flavor, the hop bitterness was fine. It definitely stands out as being more hoppy than a BW even though it is a BW strength beer, but I think it could be a little bit drier. Pitching more yeast and using 5-10% sugar would help there.

Overall impression: a very enjoyable beer. Strong hop and malt aroma, rich malt flavor followed by hop flavor, and a noticeable lingering biscuit finish from the victory malt. I guessed there was victory without even seeing the recipe. It comes through perfectly. The oak is noticeable but isn't overly heavy; I think you nailed it. Esters are appropriate for the style, indicating proper pitching rate and fermentation temp was followed. If you make a few adjustments to your water (below), I really believe this could be an award winning beer!

Process notes/suggestions for improvement: there is an astringency noticeable from using hard water with chloramine or chlorine present. I recommend using some RO water to reduce the hardness of your water for hoppier beers, and consider adding some hardness back in using gypsum if your calcium winds up being low (under 50ppm). Your local water dept. can provide you with details on the ppm calcium and total alkalinity to help determine what adjustments are required. For the chlorine/chloramine, you can filter your water slowly through a carbon filter and treat it with 1/4 of a campden tablet per 5 gallons. I like to filter my water into 5 gallon orange buckets and toss in 1/4 of a crushed campden tablet. I stir that up and let it sit around until it's ready to heat. The campden will release sulfur dioxide which will drive off the chlorine so it won't bond with the malt forming chlorophenols. It only requires about 20 minutes to drive off the chlorine, but some folks prefer to treat their water the night before they brew when they do their other prep such as measure out hops and mill grain. If you have softened water, make sure you aren't using it for any part of your process; cleaning equipment and preparing starters should be done with hard water from an outdoor tap, or after bypassing the softener, softened water contains a lot of free chlorine so even a small amount can cause a noticeable astringency.

Sacc,
Thanks for the review! I really appreciate it!

I'm probably going to do this beer again soon with a few slight modifications.

1: All grain, obvious reasons.
2: WLP001 or WLP007 yeast. The astringency you get from this beer is because of the WLP099 yeast that I used. I actually used high quality all RO water for this beer (as I have done with all my beers) so I know thats not an issue. I even go so far as to measure out hundredths of a gram of salt additions to get my water profile exactly where I want it (but not when I made this beer).
Go and taste a 120 minute IPA and remember that astringent quality from this beer, you'll find the same kind of thing going on. They both use more or less the same yeast for fermentation.
3: Secondary stage dry hopping during force carbonation. I think if I leave the hops in for much longer than the 4 weeks, you start getting vegetal off flavors from the hops that I don't want in my beer. So after I rack from secondary to corny for aging, I'll add in some fresh leaf hops and let that go for a few more weeks (instead of just one) and then crank up the CO2.
I just did the above technique on a new IIPA that I'll post the recipe as soon as I taste it.

Saccharomyces said:

Process notes/suggestions for improvement: there is an astringency noticeable from using hard water with chloramine or chlorine present. I recommend using some RO water to reduce the hardness of your water for hoppier beers, and consider adding some hardness back in using gypsum if your calcium winds up being low (under 50ppm). Your local water dept. can provide you with details on the ppm calcium and total alkalinity to help determine what adjustments are required. For the chlorine/chloramine, you can filter your water slowly through a carbon filter and treat it with 1/4 of a campden tablet per 5 gallons. I like to filter my water into 5 gallon orange buckets and toss in 1/4 of a crushed campden tablet. I stir that up and let it sit around until it's ready to heat. The campden will release sulfur dioxide which will drive off the chlorine so it won't bond with the malt forming chlorophenols. It only requires about 20 minutes to drive off the chlorine, but some folks prefer to treat their water the night before they brew when they do their other prep such as measure out hops and mill grain. If you have softened water, make sure you aren't using it for any part of your process; cleaning equipment and preparing starters should be done with hard water from an outdoor tap, or after bypassing the softener, softened water contains a lot of free chlorine so even a small amount can cause a noticeable astringency.

Click to expand...

What is RO water? also i dont have a charcoal filter would my best bet be to use bottled water with my pale ales?

RO is reverse osmosis, its a way of making very pure water. The place I get my water from is sodium exchange RO, which leaves it almost completely blank with the exception of 7ppm of sodium.
That makes it easy because I can add in whatever brewing salts I need and I can have my exact water profile that I want.

No bleach in your brewhouse? Really tasted like chlorine to me, unless you had a wild yeast infection, which can also cause chlorophenols; that seems highly unlikely though...

No bleach, I'm blaming WLP099 for the off flavor. Taste a young 120 min IPA sometime and you'll get some very similar characters, the yeast they use is nearly the same.