Hallertauer IPA

Saturday morning I brewed up a single-hop IPA to use up some Hallertauers that I opened quite a long time ago. Overall, I'm quite happy with how well hops keep in my deep freeze, but those were opened more than a year ago and I wanted to make sure to use them before they were past their prime.

The Recipe:

9 lb 2-row pale malt
12 oz Victory malt
8 oz Cara-Pils

9 AAU (84g @ 3% AA) Hallertauer @ 60
4 AAU (37g @ 3% AA) Hallertauer @ 20
4 AAU (37g @ 3% AA) Hallertauer @ 10
3 AAU (28g @ 3% AA) Hallertauer @ 5
3.75 AAU (35g @ 3% AA) Hallertauer @ 0 (flame-out)

Whirlfloc tablet @ 15

Wyeast 1099 - Whitbread Ale

Mashed at 155° for an hour using about 12.5 quarts of water. The mash was a little higher than I originally intended, but I thought I'd experiment with it rather than bringing it down to a more-typical 152°. Batch-sparged using 165-185° water and collected 6.5 gallons for the boil.

O.G.: 1.052
Est. IBU: 52.8

This was the first batch where I have had a chance to use my new grain mill. I got 74% efficiency, which is OK as long as I can maintain some kind of consistency. I could probably narrow the default gap on the mill to increase efficiency, but I want to establish a few batches' worth of baseline before I go futzing with it. I just used the hand-crank on the mill, but I think going forward I'm going to have to start using a drill or something to turn it -- it's a pretty serious workout.

On Friday I picked up a 50lb sack of 2-row pale malt plus 5 lbs each of Cara-Pils and Victory. I also grabbed four Wyeast smack packs, so now I have all the ingredients I need to brew without having to go to the homebrew shop. Of course, I'm pretty limited with my current grain selection, but I am going to build up a library of grains over the next few weeks so that I can brew pretty much whatever I want, whenever I want. So excited!