It has been way too long since my last brewday, so it felt really nice to brew once again last Sunday. Activity on the blog has also been low the previous months, I apologize for that. I bottled the berry version of the Sour Ale in December, so should soon be able to post some tasting notes on both versions of the beer. The base beer is actually quite nice, and am sad to say that I’m already down to my last bottle. During the spring, I will also be posting some (hopefully interesting) posts on the research I’ve been doing for my PhD thesis. I’m at least very excited about my results 🙂

Anyways, back to the beer and the brewday. My friend Marcus joined the brewday, and we decided to brew a simple IPA with whatever hops we had in the freezer. Since I’ve never brewed a beer with only base malt (I even added some speciality malts to the Pilsner I brewed 2 years ago), we decided to go with a malt bill of 100% Maris Otter (also some leftovers). For hopping, I had originally planned a combination of Citra and Simcoe, but on the brewday that changed to Amarillo and Simcoe. Apparently I had remember incorrectly, as I wasn’t able to find any Citra in the freezer. Amarillo and Simcoe should be a good combination though. We went with a 50 IBU bittering addition, and then added relatively big amounts of hops towards the end of the boil. I guess the IBUs will be in the 70-85 range. The brewday went extremely smoothly, and we hit all our numbers correctly (OG of 1.064). We even managed to squeeze out an extra liter of wort. We chilled to around 20C, pitched a packet of US-05 that I had in the fridge (Exp. 02/2015), and placed the fermenter in an ambient temperature of 17C. 5 hours after pitching there was already activity in the airlock, and today fermentation was progressing nicely. The fermentation aromas are smelling great, and the wort tasted really promising, so expectations are going up. We will still dry hop with both Amarillo and Simcoe (50g each), which should give the beer aroma some really nice citrus, resin and pineapple notes.

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