Brewday - Single Hop Rye IPA
For the first Homebrew Club Brew Challenge we have to brew a single hop beer, any style, so I thought that the only way to go was a big IPA, after all I’ve nearly drunk all of my Citraillo. The hop I chose is Equinox, which was previously Ex366 and now seems to have been rebranded Ekuanot. Whatever you want to call it I mainly chose it because of the flavour descriptions of melon, berry, orange peel, lime, papaya, pine and especially fresh peppers. Peppers in a beer? Well by sheer fluke my other half bought me some Brewdog beers for Christmas, one of which was Ace of Equinox, and yes, I do believe I tasted some green pepper in there. So to go big on this I ordered 100g of pellets so I could fit it all in the boil without too much mess, and another 100g of leaf for dry hopping. Which as per my last post I’m going to do in primary after initial fermentation has stopped.
For the malt bill I went 81.5% pale malt, 6.2% pale rye, 2% cara malt, 3.8% Bohemian Pilsner malt, 1% Melanoidin malt and finally the usual 5.5% torrified wheat. As you can tell I was using up some of my speciality malts here, lol. But I wanted to keep it properly pale this time with a spicy twist of rye. I always seem to overdo the crystal a bit so thought some paler cara and the others would still give a good malt backbone but not end up too malty and sweet.
Hop schedule was 40g for bittering followed by 30g with 15 minutes remaining and finally another 30g for the last 5 minutes and for steeping for 10. Everything went pretty much to plan, although I’m still not a massive fan of pellet hops, the sludge was a bit of an issue.
I pitched good old SafAle05 which should see me well through with the lower temperatures at the moment. Brew cupboard is between 16-18c so might be a bit slower but well within tolerance levels. OG was 1.062 so should end somewhere around 6.8% ABV, big enough for me.
I also used the brewday as an opportunity to bottle my Chocolate Milk Stout, as after tasting it after being on the rum soaked cocoa nibs for a week it was exactly where I wanted it to be, tasting so good that I drank the full gravity samples, lol. My daughter quickly jumped at the chance to get bottling, which I greatfully accepted. She genuinely loves doing it, lol.
