What Am I Missing?

[TwoGiantMonsters]

(originally posted under the "Extract Brewing" section, but maybe this one is better suited.)

Preface - Not a beginner but i'll always consider myself a novice.

I love a hoppy ale, and recently I've fallen in love with the New England style IPA. I've read up on the style guidelines, followed the hopping schedules and even tried a clone kit, but i'm not getting that POW of hop aroma and low bitterness that characterizes the style. It comes out rather bitter with low to moderate aroma. Not a bad beer, but not what I'm going for.

Side note, I also love Cascadian Dark Ales and my recipe for that comes out as designed. My recipe for NEIPA uses a similar malt & grain set up as my CDA (exactly the same, really) so it's dark and roasty but i was looking forward to the juicy pine aroma explosion with all the late addition hops.

Throwing style out the door I wanted this to be completely different and indescribable,
here is the recipe for my Shoggoth Ale, named after the formless beast created by New England's greatest horror/sci-fi author:

1 gallon brew -

1 gallon store bought spring water

3 oz oats
3 oz special b
3 oz chocolate malt
3 oz roasted barley

2 lbs amber DME
2 oz 180L Belgian Candi Syrup
2oz molasses

.25 oz Columbus 60 min
.60 oz Simcoe FO hopstand 10 min steep
.50 oz Columbus FO hopstand 10 min steep
.25 oz Mosaic FO hopstand 10 min steep
.25 oz Citra FO hopstand 10 min steep
.12 oz Centennial FO hopstand 10 min steep
.40 oz Simcoe whirlpool/chilling
.25 oz Mosaic whirlpool/chilling
.25 oz Columbus whirlpool/chilling
.12 oz Citra whirlpool/chilling

strain, aerate, bring back to 1 gl, pitch half pk safale 04

.25 oz Cascade first dry hop

ferment 7 days at 68 degrees

rack to seconary

1 oz Chinook second dry hop 7 days

bottle with 1 oz corn sugar

tried this recipe 3 times and like i said, it's been a good beer but it doesn't have the aroma I would expect. Any constructive advice will be welcome. Thank you

 

[SleepyCreekBrews]

Don't hop it with Columbus at 60 , thats what adds the bittering.
You could wait a half hour and add it at 30, that may help.

 

[TwoGiantMonsters]

Don't hop it with Columbus at 60 , thats what adds the bittering.
You could wait a half hour and add it at 30, that may help.

okay thank you, SCB. that does account for the bitterness, as does the 3 oz of roasted barley I'm sure. I will move that addition to 30 and drop the RB to 1 oz or maybe less. But what of the lack of powerful hop aroma?

 

[SleepyCreekBrews]

Im not sure it's possible to make a NE style IPA with that grain bill.
My guess is, pulling the molasses, roasted barley, and chocolate malt would go a long way to improving hop presence . rich, malty additions work against the hop flavor/aroma.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

I've fallen in love with the New England style IPA. I've read up on the style guidelines,...i'm not getting that POW...that characterizes the style...is dark and roasty but i was looking forward to the juicy pine aroma explosion...Throwing style out the door I wanted this to be completely different and indescribable

So you love the NEIPA style, but you want to throw style out of the door and be completely different, and then wonder why your beer no longer has the character of the style? Can you see what might be going wrong here?

Look, I think there's huge potential in applying NEIPA ideas to other beers - but let's not pretend that your Frankenstein West-Coast-hopped-New-England-black-pale-ale-with-nods-to-stout-and-Belgium is a NEIPA. And that summary kinda points to the problem - you're trying to do too much, and as a result you're making it much, much harder to work out where any problems lie. Keep it simple, just hone your process with an *actual* NEIPA rather than the Frankenstein version, and then once you've got a feel for which bits are important, then you can start to play Frankenstein. Even Frankenstein took time to learn the basics of anatomy.

So see if you can get your POW from something like this :

Water - Add a Campden if you have one to hand, and adjust the water to something like Ca 80ppm, SO4 100ppm, Cl 150ppm. What are you using to "bring back to 1gl" - spring water or municipal water? How much are you typically using? With practice, you should be able to add roughly the right amount of water from the start and not have to worry about sanitising additional water.

Grist - Most homebrewers overcomplicate their grists, and you seem to have a bad attack of it. There's world-class NEIPAs that have grists that are little more than 80% pale malt and 20% Carafoam/wheat/oats. Since you're not adding bittering hops and are using extract, let's further speed things up and drop all the grains, just use 1.5lb pale DME, for an OG around 1060, so the yeast isn't having to work too hard.

Hops - let's stick with something that's known to work well - get an ounce each of Citra, Mosaic and Galaxy pellets, maybe an extra ounce of Citra if you have it to hand, mix them up together, and split the mix into 5 portions.

1/5 10 minutes
2/5 170F for 15 minutes
1/5 dry hop at pitching
1/5 dry hop after 4 days - keep it in the freezer until needed

Yeast - 1318 is the current favourite, otherwise one of the Conan family like WLP095. If you can only easily get dried yeast then add a pinch of Belgian to your S-04 - Tree House seem to be using a blend of S-04:T-58:WB-06 of somewhere around 85:10:5. Aerate, ferment at the same temperature as you are already using. A lot of what you probably think of as hop aroma actually comes from the activity of yeast, so getting the yeast right is important.

Use a fermenter that's big enough to contain the wort and any krausen and not make a mess, but not with masses of headspace that will just provide oxygen to mute your hops.

Don't let it hang around - most of the dry-hop goodness comes out within 24-36 hours. Try not to fuss over it, you'll only let in oxygen. Hopefully it should be at FG within 7 days or not long after, and package it straight away.

The above won't make the perfect NEIPA - but it should give you beer with plenty of hop "pop" that you can then adapt further. More importantly, it's simple enough to be easily replicated, and easily troubleshooted, and as been stripped of some of the steps where things can go wrong. But if you've never had that "hop pop" then you need to go back to basics and refine your processes rather than trying to work out what's (not) happening in a complex recipe. But do keep experimenting, do side-by-side comparisons - like S-04 on its own versus S-04/T-58/WB-06, or trying different fermentation temperatures or whatever. I always split my batches these days, I'm always trying different things.

 

[TwoGiantMonsters]

So you love the NEIPA style, but you want to throw style out of the door and be completely different, and then wonder why your beer no longer has the character of the style? Can you see what might be going wrong here?

Look, I think there's huge potential in applying NEIPA ideas to other beers - but let's not pretend that your Frankenstein West-Coast-hopped-New-England-black-pale-ale-with-nods-to-stout-and-Belgium is a NEIPA. And that summary kinda points to the problem - you're trying to do too much, and as a result you're making it much, much harder to work out where any problems lie. Keep it simple, just hone your process with an *actual* NEIPA rather than the Frankenstein version, and then once you've got a feel for which bits are important, then you can start to play Frankenstein. Even Frankenstein took time to learn the basics of anatomy.

So see if you can get your POW from something like this :

Water - Add a Campden if you have one to hand, and adjust the water to something like Ca 80ppm, SO4 100ppm, Cl 150ppm. What are you using to "bring back to 1gl" - spring water or municipal water? How much are you typically using? With practice, you should be able to add roughly the right amount of water from the start and not have to worry about sanitising additional water.

Grist - Most homebrewers overcomplicate their grists, and you seem to have a bad attack of it. There's world-class NEIPAs that have grists that are little more than 80% pale malt and 20% Carafoam/wheat/oats. Since you're not adding bittering hops and are using extract, let's further speed things up and drop all the grains, just use 1.5lb pale DME, for an OG around 1060, so the yeast isn't having to work too hard.

Hops - let's stick with something that's known to work well - get an ounce each of Citra, Mosaic and Galaxy pellets, maybe an extra ounce of Citra if you have it to hand, mix them up together, and split the mix into 5 portions.

1/5 10 minutes
2/5 170F for 15 minutes
1/5 dry hop at pitching
1/5 dry hop after 4 days - keep it in the freezer until needed

Yeast - 1318 is the current favourite, otherwise one of the Conan family like WLP095. If you can only easily get dried yeast then add a pinch of Belgian to your S-04 - Tree House seem to be using a blend of S-04:T-58:WB-06 of somewhere around 85:10:5. Aerate, ferment at the same temperature as you are already using. A lot of what you probably think of as hop aroma actually comes from the activity of yeast, so getting the yeast right is important.

Use a fermenter that's big enough to contain the wort and any krausen and not make a mess, but not with masses of headspace that will just provide oxygen to mute your hops.

Don't let it hang around - most of the dry-hop goodness comes out within 24-36 hours. Try not to fuss over it, you'll only let in oxygen. Hopefully it should be at FG within 7 days or not long after, and package it straight away.

The above won't make the perfect NEIPA - but it should give you beer with plenty of hop "pop" that you can then adapt further. More importantly, it's simple enough to be easily replicated, and easily troubleshooted, and as been stripped of some of the steps where things can go wrong. But if you've never had that "hop pop" then you need to go back to basics and refine your processes rather than trying to work out what's (not) happening in a complex recipe. But do keep experimenting, do side-by-side comparisons - like S-04 on its own versus S-04/T-58/WB-06, or trying different fermentation temperatures or whatever. I always split my batches these days, I'm always trying different things.

Thank you for your input, sir.