Dogfish Head 120 Clone Trickery?

[Ego Archive]

So I am thinking I'd like to clone the *Flavor* profile of Dogfish Head 120 IPA, but I'm really not concerned with pulling the ABV up into the barley wine realm unless it's required. Is it possible to get that flavor profile with a "smaller" beer? or do I have to go big or go home?

So how would you go about mimicking 120?

I've seen the homebrewchef recipe, but they are adding tons of sugar to (I assume) offset/balance the giant IBU's, so I figure you could create the same (or at least similar) flavor by following the recipe (without the sugar additions), but by lowering amounts in the various hop additions.

That said, I'm not sure if that is actually true.

*oh- I was going to mention adding Aromatic malt, to mimic the sort of "over-the-top" maltiness I taste. But I don't know if that would help or hurt, as I've never used it.

 

[Oldsock]

For me the two most prominent flavors in 120 Minute are alcohol and sugar. You could certainly drop the gravity/alcohol some, but if you go below 14% ABV it willl be hard to make something similar. If you drop the alcohol and hops in half (for example) you’ll be left with something pretty close to 90 Minute (that is to say different, but in my opinion much tastier).

 

[boodyrischous]

One of the defining characteristics for Dogfish's IPAs is the continuous hopping methods. They use many more hop additions to increase the flavor they get out of them. They started doing it by using one of those old vibrating football games. Check out this article- Annals of Drinking: A Better Brew: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

 

[Ego Archive]

One of the defining characteristics for Dogfish's IPAs is the continuous hopping methods. They use many more hop additions to increase the flavor they get out of them. They started doing it by using one of those old vibrating football games. Check out this article- Annals of Drinking: A Better Brew: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Yeah, that's mentioned in Extreme Brewing, it sound like a cool setup. I figured I would just follow the process in the recipe above, but scale the hops back a little bit, to compensate for lower ABV.

The recipe calls for 9oz hopped over 120 minutes (for a 10 gallon batch), and another 9oz over the dry hop schedule. My thought is that I would try it in a 2.5 gallon batch, so bring the hops down to (roughly) 2.5oz. Since I'm not doing (or reducing) the sugar additions, I figure I would knock the boil hops additions to 1.5oz (.5oz each), and use the other 1.5oz (.5 oz each), for dry hop additions.

Oldsock- To me 90 minute tastes as though it has a similar level of hops to 120, but not all of the sweet (sugary) flavors. I like it, but it tastes unbalanced in the opposite direction to me. Of the 3, it seems like the 60 minute is the most balanced, where the 90 minute is hop/bitter favoring, and the 120 is malt/sweet favoring. However, I have only had 1 or 2 of each, so I'm not an expert by any means.

 

[Ego Archive]

Ok, so I decided to just go big, not sure if I'll hit the 20+%, but I'm going to try to kick it up as far as I can. The next question is, if I'm shooting for 2.5 gallon batch at the end, how much do I need to start with at the begining of a 120min boil?

I've read (and experience says) that I will lose just under a gallon per hour. That said I usually boil from 6 gallons down to 5ish. Should I figure on losing 2 gallons (so start the boil with 4.5), or more/less due to the smaller quantity of fluid?

 

[Oldsock]

If you are using the same pot, you should lose about the same amount of liquid per hour (surface area and humidity are the biggest factors in boil off rate). That said you will lose more to hops/trub that you would in a standard batch, so I would budget in a bit extra.

 

[PundyBrews]

HI
I know this is an old post, but i was wondering how this beer turned out.
I am a huge DFH fan and am trying to do the same, but finding the balance of malt and hops is a bit hard to figure out.

 

[509inc]

One of the defining characteristics for Dogfish's IPAs is the continuous hopping methods. They use many more hop additions to increase the flavor they get out of them. They started doing it by using one of those old vibrating football games. Check out this article- Annals of Drinking: A Better Brew: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Damn good read. Thanks