In honor of two years of Nextweek Brewery, I made an Imperial IPA today. It was one of my favorite brew sessions in recent memory; I brewed outside, instead of in my brewery-room, which made it much less hot and gave me much mor space to work. In all, I thought it was quite pleasant.

The recipe was 16 lbs. cargill pale mat. I started the mash at 151. It dropped to 146 after thirty minutes, so I bumped it up to 156 for the rest of a 60 minute conversion rest. Then I mashed out to 166 and sparged.

I first wort hopped this beer with 1 oz. East Kent Goldings (4% AA), .5 oz Simcoe (11.9%) and .5 oz. Amarillo (8.9%). These were all pellets, and I used promash to calculate alpha acid degredation. Once the boil started, I added .65 oz. of Amarillo and .75 oz. Simcoe. That's it for kettle hops--I didn't do any aroma additions because I'm going to dry hop with an ounce each of goldings, amarillo and simcoe. I won't be dry hopping anything for awhile, because this beer is going to take awhile to reach terminal gravity and I don't want to leave it on the dry hops too long. (I'm playing with large dry hops additions for short time periods.) This calculates to 64 I.B.U in pro-mash; my experience is that my beers are much bitterer than the promash calculations would suggest, which I attribute to my high boil-off rate--today, for example, my boil began around a gravity of 66.

By the way, the final gravity was 1.089!

I fermented 2 quarts of 1.040 gravity wort with a vial of White Labs Dry English Ale yeast, which finished fermenting yesterday. I decanted it and pitched the slurry into my wort. It's already fermenting well. I just hope I don't need a blow off hose.