All-grain IPAs and Porters. This hobby will never end.

IPA after IPA--I'm zeroing in on a recipe. The basic sketch is one ounce of a high alpha bittering hop at the begining of a sixty minute boil, 1-2 ounces of cascade hops or similar at fifteen minutes, one ounce cascade at the end of the boil, one ounce cascade when racked to secondary. I always look for an original gravity between 1.065 and 1.074, but little things have kept me from hitting that number exactly.

The mash (oh yes, I started all-grain brewing) is simple: 12lbs. american 2-row malted barley, 1 lb. crystal malt (was doing 40L, now doing 20L) and a half pound of victory.

I haven't decided how to do my next IPA. I'm definitely looking for something more distictive in the malt character of the beer. I don't necessaily want size in the malt; rather, thus far, the malt character has been just kinda boring to me and I want something that merits a comment, even if it isn't what you first notice about the beer. I've been doing lot of bittering with chinook and I'm going to try magnum instead for the next one. I might bump the hops from 1.5 ounces cascade at 15 to 1 oz. cascade at 15 and half an ounce at ten, plus the aromatic additions at 1 and when racking. I'm going to stick to cascade for all the finishing with this next batch.

I will be making a second all-grain porter eventually. My first all-grain porter one was my first truly all-grain beer. (I had one IPA that needed some malt extract to raise the gravity.) It is good. I want a little more sweetness and a little more bitterness. The sweetness should be no problem if I manage not to attenuate 80%. I used two ounces of fuggles (7.4 HBU for sixty minutes in a five gallon batch) in the last one for bittering and the beer, though balanced enough, would have been too sweet were it not for some accidental attenuation. I want 9-10 HBU for the next one. I'm thinking target or perle will do that well.

But before I make either of those, I'm going to make ten gallons of weizen wort and pitch two different yeasts into it: Bavarian Weizen Ale WLP351 and Hefe Weizen Ale WLP300. I'm totally looking forward to this experiment.

And there's a brown ale around the corner too.