Brewing: Black IPA

For my third batch of homebrew I decided to attempt an uncommon but interesting and delicious style of beer, Black IPA. Black IPA combines the dark chocolate and coffee flavors of a Dry Stout with the strong hops and bracingly bitter qualities of IPA.

Adding flavor with steeping grain.

This recipe is made with malt extract so the first steps after getting all my equipment ready were to pour six gallons of spring water into my brew kettle and add the steeping grain in a mesh bag. Steeping grain is used in extract recipes to give your beer flavors like you would get using a full grain method. The grain should be steeped for at least 30 minutes but should be removed when the temperature reaches 170º.

After bringing the liquid up to a rolling boil I added my malt extract and my bittering hops. I used hop pellets which need to be put in a fine mesh bag before adding them to the boil. They're called bittering hops because they add bitterness (is this self-explanatory?) to your beer to balance out the sweetness of the malt. Different tastes call for more or less bitterness but without any hops your beer will likely be much too sweet for the vast majority of people. The malt and the bittering hops boiled for 60 minutes. I added more hops ten minutes before the boil was complete and again one minute before. These are called aroma hops and they impart their hoppy flavor to the beer. I will add even more hops seven days into the process. This is known as dry hopping.

Pouring in liquid malt extract.

Hop pellets

After boiling for an hour you get what's called sweet wort (pronounced wert). Now it needs to be cooled off. I use an immersion chiller which is a coil of copper tubing that fits in the brew kettle and has hoses attached for running cold water through it. The wort needs to be cooled to about 130º. Next I drained my kettle into my bottling bucket (a food-grade 6-gallon bucket with a spigot). This helps aerate the wort and it's easier to pour it into a big bucket rather than the narrow opening of my fermentation tank.

Chilling, literally.

Getting in the brewing spirit with a glass of my previous batch, a Belgian-style Tripel.

After taking a sample to test the wort's original gravity I transferred it into my fermenter, a 6-gallon plastic carboy. I pitched my yeast into the fermenter and put the stopper and airlock in place. Then I moved the fermenter into a dark closet where the temperature will remain fairly stable. Now I wait for fermentation to complete and for the chunks of vegetable matter (called trub) to settle to the bottom. This will take about two weeks.

Transferring from bottling bucket to fermenter.

Fermenter, stoppered and with airlock in place.

If you have experience brewing, you probably spotted a problem. There isn't enough head space (the space between the liquid and the top of the container) in my carboy. Some very active yeast and not enough space meant that some foam overflowed into the airlock. I pulled the airlock out and covered the hole with plastic wrap. Then I cleaned out the airlock, refilled it with vodka and put it back into place.

The recipe I used was put together by Club DOZE. I get my supplies and equipment from morebeer.com.