Brewed a black IPA last night. Pretty much a mix of ideas borrowed from various sources (mostly here), but what was different for me was that there were a couple of changes to my brew day and system.
I've started doing BIABs for week night brews where I want to get the thing done quickly without fuss and although limited, it does the job. Anyway, with my mash I would usually either
- Have all of the brewing water in the pot with the malt, lift and boil leaving me with let's say 15L pre boil. Not cool...
- Or, I'd purposely overshoot my gravity with more malt and dilute to get the volume up, obviously very inefficient.
So last night as I wanted a reasonably high gravity beer I did a mini batch sparge, where I had some 80c water ready in a second pot. Then after draining from the main pot I dunked the bag of malt in that. Got my volume up nicely and efficiency was way better.
The other thing was that I recently upgraded my plain stock pot to having a tap and bazooka screen. So I found out that bazookas don't like to strain from a lot of hop matter. And in this wort, there was a lot of hop matter. Most of the hops were leaf and I let them loose in the pot. So it took ages to strain the wort. Also as I had to stir the hops out of the way of the strainer to keep the flow going, a heap of break material made its way into the fermenter. So lesson learned, use a hop sack for leaf hops. I lost a lot of wort to the hops :(
The other thing I did was to keep my black malt away from the wort until the very end of the boil. I steaped the Carafa iii in a small pot of warm water while I was getting ready and brought it up to boiling point just before adding it to the main wort at 1 min. I know lots of you have done various different things to get the colour into the beer without all that roast. So I'm looking forward to seeing how I did. Probably not as black as I'd like, but there was a lot of green and brown matter in there affecting the colour.
I used the Conan yeast for this straight from the pack. But I poured myself one vial for later... Hopefully there's enough yeasts for a decent fermentation (only 15L of wort, I'm hopeful).
All in all a good evening and I learned a fair bit.