I love proper NEIPA's, but I generally don't like drinking strong (7-8% ish) beers. I much rather have a couple of pints of a more sessionable ~5% beer since I tend to get headaches quite easily from drinking. I've been brewing a few of those, but haven't been quite satisfied, they've always felt lacking compared to the stronger ones, although appearance has been spot on.
My previous batches have consisted of 2-row malt, wheat malt and flaked oats. Hops have been "standard" NEIPA hops (Citra, Galaxy, Simcoe, Mosaic, El Dorado) of varying combos and around 5-8 g/l dry hops. Yeast used have been S-04, S-05, Verdant IPA and Imperial A38.
The previous batches have always turned out "fine", but the most prominent issue has been that they've lacked body and malt character, the taste kinda falls flat even though there's a descent amount of hops coming through. Appearance has been great though.
This time I settled for a hop combo of Citra (cryo), Idaho7 (cryo) and Galaxy, mainly because I had the Galaxy in stock and the two others were the only cryo variants I could get hold of. I also decided to double dry-hop, some of my batches have been single dry hop. For yeast I used a single pack of A38, didn't make a starter. For the malt I did the same 2-row, wheat and flaked oats as before, but this time I decided to throw in some toasted oats as well, hoping this would create a more complex malt base (I got this: Small Batch Speciality Malt; No 4 Toasted Malted Oats | Crisp Malt ). And I think this is what paid off and made this a great session hazy. I was honestly a bit scared during mash in, because the toasted oats were really prominent both in smell and taste.
When tasting the final beer now though (8 days since kegging), I don't really find the toasty oat taste in the finished beer, just a nice rounded malt backbone behind the hop flavors, and a good slightly creamy mouthfeel. This is definitely a beer I will brew again, and make no changes to the recipe, which is rare for me.
Perhaps the use of toasted oats or similar in a beer like this is old news for some of you, but somehow it had eluded me until I read about it somewhere else (pretty sure it wasn't this forum), so I thought to share.
If someone wants to have a closer look, here's the recipe: https://share.brewfather.app/rdwsZBTJVBQZEK
And here's the mandatory picture:
My previous batches have consisted of 2-row malt, wheat malt and flaked oats. Hops have been "standard" NEIPA hops (Citra, Galaxy, Simcoe, Mosaic, El Dorado) of varying combos and around 5-8 g/l dry hops. Yeast used have been S-04, S-05, Verdant IPA and Imperial A38.
The previous batches have always turned out "fine", but the most prominent issue has been that they've lacked body and malt character, the taste kinda falls flat even though there's a descent amount of hops coming through. Appearance has been great though.
This time I settled for a hop combo of Citra (cryo), Idaho7 (cryo) and Galaxy, mainly because I had the Galaxy in stock and the two others were the only cryo variants I could get hold of. I also decided to double dry-hop, some of my batches have been single dry hop. For yeast I used a single pack of A38, didn't make a starter. For the malt I did the same 2-row, wheat and flaked oats as before, but this time I decided to throw in some toasted oats as well, hoping this would create a more complex malt base (I got this: Small Batch Speciality Malt; No 4 Toasted Malted Oats | Crisp Malt ). And I think this is what paid off and made this a great session hazy. I was honestly a bit scared during mash in, because the toasted oats were really prominent both in smell and taste.
When tasting the final beer now though (8 days since kegging), I don't really find the toasty oat taste in the finished beer, just a nice rounded malt backbone behind the hop flavors, and a good slightly creamy mouthfeel. This is definitely a beer I will brew again, and make no changes to the recipe, which is rare for me.
Perhaps the use of toasted oats or similar in a beer like this is old news for some of you, but somehow it had eluded me until I read about it somewhere else (pretty sure it wasn't this forum), so I thought to share.
If someone wants to have a closer look, here's the recipe: https://share.brewfather.app/rdwsZBTJVBQZEK
And here's the mandatory picture:
They're good people and couldn't thank me enough for the case of bottles bought. Gave me a tour of each barrel and stuff out back. Gave me access to the big ass quad on the right that hadn't been released
