"Golden Promise" India Pale Ale

Maybe it's just me, but I've never really found hop descriptions to be very useful. For example, people describe Nelson Sauvin hops as tasting like "passionfruit," but I don't get that at all. People describe Saaz hops as "mild" but that doesn't really help me imagine the flavor. I even read one text that described a particular kind of hop as having "a hoppy aroma." Um, thanks...

So, I figured the best way to understand the flavor of Nelson Sauvin hops was to taste it for myself, in a single-hop, single malt IPA that I brewed. In other words, a "SMaSH" (Single Malt And Single Hop) beer.

For the base malt, I chose Golden Promise. Maris Otter would have been a good choice as well, but I wanted to try something new.

Recipe

This was a 5 gallon batch. I cheated just a little bit on the "single malt" concept by using a few ounces of acidulated malt. This was to get the pH right. Obviously you will have to adjust this based on your own water profile.

15 pounds Golden Promise (1.1 Lovibond)
6 ounces Acidulated Malt (3.0 Lovibond)

Gigayeast GY054 "Conan" yeast

60-minute boil
1 oz Nelson hops at 60 minutes 
1 oz Nelson hops at 5 minutes
1 oz Nelson hops at 0 minutes
2 oz Nelson dry-hop for 5 days in secondary

Water Profile

In the past, I've used distilled water for all my all-grain batches. Because it's completely devoid of minerals, it's a clean slate that I can add whatever minerals I need to to reach the correct mash pH. However, this time around, none of the stores I went to had any distilled water! So I was finally forced to take the plunge and used filtered water from my house. This water was run through a Pur filter to remove chlorine and some heavy metals, but otherwise unchanged.

I was able to get a water quality report for my local area. I came up with the following numbers for Bru'n Water:

Calcium 11.0 ppm
Magnesium 3.9 ppm
Sodium 10.0 ppm
Patassium 0.6 ppm
Iron 0.0 (unknown)
Bicarbonate 44.7 ppm
    calculated from 37.0 ppm CaCO3 + 8.0 pH
Carbonate (unknown)
Sulfate 17.0 ppm
Chloride 9.0 ppm
Nitrate (unknown)
Nitrite (unknown)
Fluoride 1.0 ppm

Total Hardness as CaCO3 43
Permanent hardness as CaCO3 7
Temporary Hardness as CaCO3 37
Alkalinity ppm as CaCO3 37
RA Efffective Hardness 36
Residual Alkalinity ppm as CacO3 27

Thankfully, I didn't have to make any last-minute adjustments to my recipe... 6 ounces of acidulated malt worked for both the distilled water and city water calculations. I don't think I will go back to distilled water ever again, since using city water is so much cheaper (I save $1 a gallon) and doesn't require me to leave the house. Our city watch comes from Hetchy Hetchy and seems to be pretty good for brewing.

Process

I used 4.5 gallons of water for mashing, and 5 gallons for sparging. The mash turned out to be a little thick, so I later added another half gallon of water from the HLT. The fermentation was very vigorous. Even though I had a blowoff tube rather than an airlock, it still wasn't enough... the blowoff tube got clogged and blew off! I think another reason for this is that there wasn't much headspace in my 5 gallon fermenter... I had 4.75 gallons or so in there. Luckily I was present when the beer volcano occurred, so I could clean things up a bit and put the blowoff tube back on.

I got 84% attenuation on this beer, going from an OG of 1.065 to an FG of 1.010. This is higher than what Gigayeast claims Conan can do, which is 78-82%. I guess this is probably partly because I was using 100% base malt with no crystal or other kilned malts.

One of the lessons I learned from Chocula is to avoid having loose objects in the fermenter, because it makes siphoning very difficult. So this time, while dry-hopping, I didn't just toss the hops in like before. Instead, I kept the dry hops in a bag. One end of the bag was sticking out the top of the fermenter, and the other end was in the fermenter. Since I have a rubber fermenter cover, it could stretch to accommodate this arrangement. However, the hops really swelled up when the got wet, which meant that removing the hop bag through the narrow carboy opening was quite difficult. I had to resort to spooning out the hops from the bag by hand.

I'm not sure what the perfect solution is here. Perhaps I could use multiple smaller bags, and skip trying to remove them prior to siphoning? Or perhaps a conical fermenter would make this easier?

Results

Golden Promise is my best beer yet! Sometimes simple really is better, it seems. It was a big hit with everyone.

Visually, it is a pale golden color, and cloudy. "Conan" doesn't really seem to floculate, similar to a Heffeweizen yeast.

There is definitely a white wine note in the taste, which goes pretty well with the high alcohol content of 7.5%. This beer definitely has a robust body... I am definitely going to start off my IPAs in the 1.060s from now on.

I am entering this into the 2015 Hop N Barley competition.. My only regret is that I don't have more of it. At the end of the day, I only really got 4.25 gallons or so out of this batch. Hops really soak up liquid!