A collaboration beer born from the local social network a2mi.social. George suggested a Black IPA; I had Centennial hops to use up so decided to brew “Black Hearted”, an improvised recipe loosely inspired by Bell’s Two-Hearted (though we also used a bunch of newer wave hops in addition to Centennial).
Easy brew day. For recent brews, I had the grain crushed at Adventures in Homebrewing and experienced a middling 70-75% brewhouse efficiency. Their mill is set to a cautious crush. For this brew, George crushed the grains quite fine and we fly sparged slooooowly, which I credit for the whopping 94% (!!) efficiency we experienced. (We did have a stuck mash but got out of it quickly). 94% is not out of the question: Kal, the creator of The Electric Brewery on which my system is modeled, claims to get a consistent 95% efficiency.
This was a record for me, though, and took me by surprise. While we planned for 17 gallons of wort, we ended up with more like 22 gallons. An extra batch worth! I didn’t have a pack of neutral yeast on hand so that fermenter ended up as a Belgian Black IPA, with BE-256. We reformulated hop additions on the fly to cover the extra wort.
OG about 1.065. US-05 in the other 3 fermenters. I only had 8 ounces of Centennial and saved it all for the dry hop. Fermented at ambient basement temps, ~70F ?? Both fermentations kicked off the same day and finished regular airlock activity by 48 hours later. The BE-256 smelled of pear and banana while the US-05 was all regular fruity hop aroma. Recipe color says about 31 SRM, total IBU around 56.
Recipe
- 79% 2-row (36 lb)
- 4% Carapils (2 lb)
- 4% Midnight Wheat (2 lb)
- 4% Crystal 80L (2 lb)
- 4% Munich (2 lb)
- 3% Chocolate Malt (1.5 lb)
- 5.7 oz Magnum @ 60 min (45 IBU)
- 2 oz Citra @ whirlpool (4 IBU)
- 6 oz Amarillo @ whirlpool (7 IBU)
- 4 oz Citra @ dry hop 10 days
- 4 oz Amarillo @ dry hop 10 days
- 8 oz Centennial @ dry hop 10 days
Packaging etc.
Dry hopped, then didn’t get around to bottling/kegging. I finally bottled the US-05 share after 19 days on the dry hops; I’d meant to do 7. We’ll see how that affects the beer. I used 106g table sugar in about 5 gallons, shooting for 2.4 vol CO2.
This is an easy one to label the bottles: draw a black heart on the cap.
The BE-256 batch got kegged the same day, 19 days on the dry hops.