Today I’m brewing a beer for my old man’s 60th birthday, happening at the end of May. He’s quite fond of IPAs so today we’re brewing an NZ IPA.
The recipe is based off the GladField NZ IPA in their latest malt catalogue, but it was tweaked a bit to suit the volume I need and also use up some of my existing hops.
Recipe
Stats
| Batch size | 21L |
| Target OG | 1.069 |
| Recorded OG | 1.072 |
| Target FG | 1.014 |
| Recorded FG | tba |
| Estimated alcohol | 7.3% |
| Actual alcohol | tba |
| Fermentation temp | 19.4°C |
| Fermentation time | 14 days |
Ingredients
| Water in Grainfather | 21.8L |
| Water in sparge heater | 11.6L |
| Gladfield American Ale Malt | 5.78kg |
| Gladfield Wheat Malt | 0.58kg |
| Gladfield Toffee Malt | 0.29kg |
| Gladfield Sour Grapes Malt | 0.14kg |
| Nelson Sauvin - 60 min | 27g |
| Nelson Sauvin - 15 min | 23g |
| Nelson Sauvin - 5 min | 12g |
| Southern Cross - 5 min | 12g |
| Pacific Jade - 5 min | 12g |
| Lallemand BRY-97 | 2 pack |
| Pacifica - Dry hop 2 days | 22g |
| Southern Cross - Dry hop 2 days | 22g |
My last brew I was really far down on my efficiency - only 65%. To try and counter this, I mashed for 90 minutes instead of 30. Today I actually forgot to turn on the sparge water heater until about 10 minutes before I was due to sparge so the actual mash time was probably more like 100 minutes!
The good news is this seemed to fix my efficiency. Unfortunately, I only managed to get just less than 20L into the fermenter. This is a reasonably common issue so I think I’m going to start adding a litre or two of water into the Grainfather above the calculations from the website.
The only issue I’m having with my equipment is I got some longer tubing for the chiller but they’re too thin and bend too much when the hot wort flows through which blocks the pipe. The solution for now is a rake handle.
Other than that, all good! The brewery cat Maiki seemed happy enough with the proceedings.
