There are lots of methods out there for getting the haze and mouthfeel that NE IPAs are known for. I was thinking the other day, and one method I've never heard anyone mention (perhaps for good reason) is doing sort of a partial raw ale. Basically, I'm wondering about the idea of removing a portion of the wort once it was at pasteurization temps -- but before it hit boiling temps -- then adding it back during chilling. In theory, the non-boiled portion of the wort should not have a protein break, which means the proteins would stay in suspension and contribute haze and mouthfeel. Obviously, you'd have to adjust the hop additions accordingly to the smaller boil volume. Has anyone ever tried something like this, or is this a recipe for disaster?
Hi. No I haven't been able to yet. My summer has been busy so my brewing has slowed down. Hopefully I'll be able to give this a try on a half batch sometime soon.
What % of the preboil volume were you thinking about pulling out and not boiling? And I assume putting it back in at the end of the boil? I just used oat milk for the first time in a NEIPA. Even though it was already liquid, I pulled .5 gals of preboil wort to mix with .5 gals of oat milk. I ended up adding that 1 gal mixture to the 4.75 gallons boiled wort in the kettle with 5 mins remaining in boil. It ended up having a great mouthfeel.
Also, if NEIPAs are indeed a style now, and the desired mouth-feel is indeed attributable to the haze (as seems to be the accepted view), then experimenting with ways to increase the haze is indeed a worthy endeavor.
The thing is, raw ale is still being brewed to this day. (See also here - but inveighing against raw ale is a long tradition, too.) Treating boiled beer as more evolved or inherently better seems like Whig history to me. When a brewer adds brett to a beer, or pitches something other than a pure culture of clean yeast, is he un-doing what took thousands of years to learn and perfect? Maybe we took a wrong turn when we started boiling the wort! (Or maybe you can make good beer either way.) Anyway I'm all in support of this experiment and I wonder whether you need to boil any of the wort, except maybe a small amount for the bittering hops.
Sorry, I just realized I never answered your question. I hadn't really decided for sure, but I was thinking of pulling 1/4 to 1/2 of the total volume out. I wanted to leave enough volume behind that I would still get effective hop utilization without having to break the bank to buy a ton of Citra hops.
In that first article you linked about raw ale... the author gave 3 reasons for boiling the wort. The third said "removing protein from the wort to improve flavor stability". Do you (or anyone) know what "instability" may come from making a Raw Ale 0 IBU NEIPA? Sounds like an interesting experiment... no boil, tons of proteins with all hops added as whirlpool and dryhop. I'm going to call it RA0IBUNEIPA
It does sound like a fun experiment, although anyone contemplating it should read Scott Janish's blog post describing his "zero hot-side hopped NEIPA." He concluded in part: I’m becoming more convinced of the whirlpool/steep step (or maybe just late addition hops) contributing to the hop flavor aspect of NEIPAs. I’ve been a little skeptical that such a step is necessary when so many of the oils are evaporated during the boil and purged or changed during fermentation, but it was extremely clear to me that this beer had very little of that hop saturated flavor that makes NEIPAs so tasty! As for "instability" in raw ale, I can't really say. I have brewed a couple of no-boil Berliner weisse beers, but they weren't noticeably unstable. In fact one of them aged pretty well (the other was not very good to begin with, but I guess it was shelf-stable). A thorough boil covers a multitude of sins in terms of sanitation, so possibly the issue is just that raw ales tend to be more prone to infection. [edited for formatting]
