Northeast Pales/IPA/DIPA

LOL!

Cheers to you sir!!

 

How would you go about checking how much Calcium Chloride and Sulfate in your water? Looking to up my water treatment game.

 

Start by searching for your town's water report, Portland's was pretty easy to find online. Then download the Bru'n water spreadsheet and read everything on the instructions page. If you've never looked into water treatment before you will probably get frustrated after trying to understand it the first two or three times. Watching some youtube videos helped me a lot. For adjusting chloride and sulfate in IPAs you'll probably only need gypsum and calcium chloride.

 

If you plan to brew a "New England" style IPA just build your water with Distilled or RO. Add calcium chloride and gypsum to target using EZ Water, Bru'n water or brew chiper. DI water at whole foods is $.39 if you already have a container.

 

Sorry, I assumed dry hopping is a given rather than secret in any American IPA

 

Every IPA, even old school 19th Century British-style IPAs, should feature dry-hopping. Talk to @patto1ro , he'll have more info on this.
The NE IPA just features way more than was previously thought necessary, and with specific hops.

 

Many British styles were dry-hopped. The original Russian Stout had a pound per 36-gallon barrel.

 

This is only incremental evidence but I think you get a much hazier beer if you are dry hopping cold (in the keg) vs dry hopping warmer at room temps. Obviously your extraction rate is much slower but I think there might be something to this , at least in my experience.

 

There's a special article on what causes haze featuring Sam Richardson of Other Half in one of the latest Beer Advocate mags. It has to do with a lot of different things. I recently did a super dry hopped IPA with Oats and Wheat and it came out hazy as hell. Will share a photo once it's done carbing up.

 

Sounds like a great read. Does he mention what yeast strain he uses?? Or hopping techniques??

 

He talks a lot about what different hopping methods do to a beer. He definitely doesn't give away his strain, I'm not sure many brewers would do that ha.

 

A lot of them will. Or if they are using a unique strain, they will tell you what it evolved from and/or what the closest available strain is.

 

Commercial brewers do tend to me selective in what details they share in the brewing of their beers. The brewer at Trillium (JC Tetreault) posted in a few times in this thread providing some selective details.

There seems to be folks ‘concentrating’ on ingredients and amounts of ingredients but the aspect of brewing process has just as much of an impact (and sometimes a bigger impact) on the resulting beer. The details of brewing process seems to get lesser attention from the brewers or the homebrewers asking questions.

I think that it is worthwhile to give a ‘shout out’ to Vinnie Cilurzo who took the time to write an article about cloning Pliny the Elder providing all of the details concerning ingredients but just as importantly brewing process details as well. That article was published in the July/Aug 2009 issue of Zymurgy Magazine.

Cheers to Vinnie Cilurzo!!

 

No one will argue against the importance of process. But knowing you have the ingredients right means you can begin to tweak your process and hone in on your clone, if that is your desire, or just figure out what ingredients are contributing to the flavors you like, even if cloning it exactly is not within grasp.

 

Peter, I have absolutely no doubt that folks would argue that way. Having stated that, the majority of discussion by both homebrewers and the brewers are non-process related.

Cheers!

Jack

 

On the topic of process, this will come as no surprise to most of you, but I just had to see for myself the effect of using gelatin on a beer like this.
I made a WY 1318, 4.5% 90% pale 10% oats beer with about 1.25oz/gal of centennial hops, split between a hot whirlpool and dry hop. I split the batch and bottled half straight out of primary, and the other half cold crashed and fined with gelatin.

I expected the fined version to have a little less hop presence, but it absolutely neutered the beer. I mean 75 percent of the hops had vanished. Also, the mouthfeel was destroyed. It was watery, whereas the cloudy version was soft and full, even at just a 1.047 og. I shared some at a homebrew meeting and everyone had similar impressions.
The cloudy version was lovely, of course.

 

Talking ingredients is the first step to getting the flavor right, IMO. I'll assume your statement about what the majority do is accurate and will speculate that a lot of people don't let the conversation go far enough to get to process. Or they believe that the process that a commercial brewer uses might not be relevant on the homebrew scale (sometimes they might be right). It's usually easier to lay your hands on some new ingredient for experimentation than it is to manipulate your process. So if Sierra Nevada tells me they get that unique flavor from Citra hops, I'm probably going to first experiment with Citra hops before I say "well maybe I could get the same flavor from Simcoe if I just used a Torpedo."

 

There is a lot discussion about hopping techniques, how long to dry hop, mash temps, fermentation temps, ways to reduce oxidization, pitching rates, starters etc that I would classify as "process" related.

I agree just having the right ingredients won't make great beer, that the process is equally as important as the ingredients. Most new Brewers make bad beer or decent beer because their process stinks.

 

Process is more important than ingredients. My club did an activity where the same ingredients were split between Brewers who went home and brewed the beer. The beers were judged by the BJCP club members. There was a 20 point difference from high to low scores.

Everything else you say is spot on.

 

You make a good point. All the homebrewer's in my club have access to the same ingredients but the process or skill of the brewer is what seperates the great beers from the others.

I will say this if the ingredients are bad, like stale and old you can't make great regardless of the process.