mash temp

Stay at the lower temp. spectrum (example: 146-151 F) for a wort with more fermentable sugars, more dryness, and less body or near the higher end (example: 153-158 F) for a wort with less fermentable sugars, less dryness, and more body.

I would recommend 149-ish or less due to the reasoning you provided in the first opening line.

 

Agreed, 149 witha very clean fermenting yeast: WLP001 or safale-05. What is your composition of grist? You want 90% base malt for a big dry beer.

 

+1 more to the lower temp, 148 or so. If you want it to be big and dry you might want to also consider adding something like table sugar, invert sugar, or honey.

 

You're already down to 80% fermentable, so do the math to figure out how much alcohol you'll get and what you FG will be. Personally I say you're out of a big-dry IPA range due to the dark(er) malts. Will it be good? Sure, will it be as dry as you want? Maybe. Depends on your taste and what you're really going for. This to me looks more like a hoppy porter.

 

Is this for a 5 gallon batch?

+1 to the low end of the range. Certainly <150. Otherwise, the relatively high FG will destroy the dryness you're after. You also might want to consider using Pilsner as part of your base malt to increase the perception of dryness.

 

As another option, dump the black patent and use sinamar from Weyerman...adds color without changing your grist, and you can add more 2 row OR table sugar to futher dry out your beer.

 

@MacNCheese

He will be fermenting in something like this, courtesy of Exxon:

 

Thanks, guys. Beergumby's brew partner here. We considered the Sinamar but decided against it. We'd rather have a bit of flavor from the dark malts as opposed to just color. The grist is loosely based on an old ale we made and liked.

And we're not going for bone dry, we just want to get good attenuation. We realized we had a thermometer problem and we were mashing too warm - most of our ferments were quitting at around 1.020 or 1.024. So we're trying to reform our mash regimen to get down to a more efficient terminal gravity. We've also dumped the bad thermometers and got a good one that we can calibrate each brew day.

Thanks for the insight.

 

I'd mask at 149 and consider WL007

 

That grist is gonna end up making something closer to a porter than a black IPA, but it sounds like that's sorta what you're going for.

 

That's not particularly big for batch that size. It's only 1.063ish which should make a 6.8% abv beer.