Premise and Recipe

I’ve been wanting to try out Cashmere hops since I heard about them last year. In the summer, I was able to find a nursery that sold field-ready plants, and was able to pick one up. Unfortunately it was late in the season, and I wont get a good crop for a couple of years anyways.

However, a couple of weeks ago, I was looking on the Short Finger Brewing Co website, and found that they had some in stock, and from a local Southern Ontario hop farm! Excited, I looked through their other locally-sourced hops, and thought I’d try some Rakau hops, which I have not had the chance to use before. I also had some Galaxy hops in my freezer which I have been itching to use again, thus giving me 3 feature hops to use in a good hop-centric beer.

In trying to figure out what to brew with these, and how to get a good few brews in, I devised a plan to split a 23L batch of IPA into 3 separate kettles mid-boil (post-bittering), then adding my late addition hops to each split. Following chilling, I would ferment in 6 160oz (4.75L) jugs, and dry hop in half of them with their respective featured hops.

After looking through a few IPA recipes, I built mine on the low gravity side, but still enough to provide a good backbone to the hops. Canadian 2-Row for base malt, light munich for bready flavour, dark caramel (30/35) munich for residual sweetness, some caramel 120L for some raisin notes, and a handful of Cara-Pils for head retention.

For a bittering hop, I usually use Magnum for its clean properties and high effectiveness. 15g is enough in a 23L batch for 20 IBUs, and as I’m trying to highlight the late additions and dry hops, I don’t want to go overboard on the bitterness, that should be enough.

Brew Day

I heated my strike water and mashed in a little lower than expected, but not far off the mark (66.1 instead of 66.7).

While mashing, I divided up my hop additions and got organized for the boil.

After conversion, I drained the first running from the grain bag, and I batch-sparged in the kettle, and drained again.

That gave me a pre-boil gravity of 1.040 with about 26L of wort, pretty close to the brim of my kettle: time for FermCap S! Also time for First Wort bittering hops.

The first 50 mins of the boil were business-as-usual. Then I checked the boil volume and divided into 3 equal parts into 2 additional pots to continue their boil inside on my stove.

Now that the boil is divided, I added my chiller for sanitization, and proceeded with my feature hop additions (also 1/3 of a whirlfloc for each pot)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After my additions, I whirlpooled and chilled each batch and put them in my ferementers.

Time for the gravity reading.

Fermenters all loaded into my fermentation chamber.

I re-hydrated my US-05 and pitched, setting my fermentation temperature to 18 degrees for 7 days, then slowly raising it to 20 following that to ensure full attenuation.

More details to follow when fermentation is done!

For those of you interested in the recipe, I have included a PDF copy as well as BSMX and BeerXML files in a ZIP File.