Double Valent-IPA

I made this recipe on Valentines day (no, I'm not a bad husband - at least not because of this - my wife was working that Sunday). I decided to make her this as a Valen-times present.

I'd had my eye on this recipe at HomeBrewTalk.com for a while:

Crosseyed PA (Double IPA)

Grains
14.75 lbs 2 Row (US)
1.00 lbs Munich
.25 lbs Crystal 20L

Adjuncts
1.00 lbs Corn Sugar added at boil start
Whirlfloc tablet added @ 15 min

Hops
2 oz Centennial (10% Alpha) @ 60 min
2 oz Chinook (13% Alpha) @ 60 min
1 oz Centennial (10% Alpha) @ 15 min
1 oz Galena (13% Alpha) @ 5 min
* 2 oz Galena (13% Alpha) Dry hopped for 7 days
All my hops were in pellet form

Yeast
1000mL starter of #WLP001 California Ale

I used 1 tbs of 5.2 Mash Stabilizer in my strike water

Mash in with 5 gallons of water at 167.1F and hold mash @ 155F for 90 minutes
Drain Mash Tun and sparge with 3.67 gallons of water @ 168F
Boil volume should be 6.50 gallons
Flame on and boil for 60 min to get a final volume of 5 gallons into primary.


I had a bunch of BMC drinkers, and "I don't like hoppy beer" drinkers destroy a keg of this in no time at a BBQ in my backyard. It destroyed them in return, with an ABV of about 9%

I had to sub Caramel 10L for the Crystal 20L because that's what I had. I also had to sub Nugget in place of the Galena in the 5 minute addition due to availability at the homebrew store.

I know that as grain bills get bigger, efficiency gets worse, but this was terrible. I got 4 gallons at 1.090, which is 80% of the 5 gallons at 1.090 that the recipe calls for. I'm assuming that's at an assumed 70% efficiency. I haven't done my own efficiency calculations yet, but that's only because I know it's going to be abysmal.

I changed some things up for this brew. I tried a fly sparge with a hot liquor tank and a cPVC manifold I built. I also built a cPVC manifold for the mash tun and this was the maiden voyage. Those all surely affected things - possibly for good and for bad.

This beer is in secondary as I write this post. It'll be in the keg (and a few bottles so I can hand it out to my hophead friends) in a few weeks. I'll update about the outcome.

In the secondary with the Galena.  This was a plug instead of pellets and, as you'd expect, the particulate is larger.  That should make racking that much easier later on.

Update: I kegged this the other day.  It finished out at 1.018, which should give it an ABV of about 9.5%.