Tilapia: A West Coast IPA

The time has come again to brew! I went so many weekends thinking, "I should brew this weekend" only to have it come to naught. Not last weekend! I had the ingredients and I was ready to go this morning. This was a really long brew day with a few interesting twists. So I wound up brewing a slightly different beer from what I had expected to make, I ran into a couple of process issues, and I finished it off by doing a fairly deep clean in my brewery.

My little man helping me mill grains.

I suppose I should first introduce the recipe. This is one of the first all-grain recipes I came up with, and I developed it after an event at work where the discussion had turned to hop varieties and I had mentioned wanting to try Mosaic. Mosaic is a new hop variety, so new, in fact that it was fairly recently called only "HBC 369". It's a bit similar to Citra in that it has those really big tropical fruit flavors, and is a fairly high-alpha acid hop. When I mentioned this, someone at the event told me that they had an a pale ale at their desk that featured Mosaic, and before I could respond, they ran off to get it. We all sampled it, and I knew at that point that I wanted to make a beer that featured this hop. Because it was such a high-alpha hop, I knew it could serve both for aroma/flavor and for bittering, so I developed a single-hop recipe. This recipe calls for 10 ounces of hops for 10 gallons of beer. I was holding off on making it again because Mosaic hops are so hard to come by lately, but apparently my LHBS over-ordered and was having a "buy 5, get 5 free" special. Perfect. Now I had no excuse not to re-brew this recipe, which was very well received last time. When I formulated the recipe, I didn't really want to use a lot of crystal malt (though I did use some, as you can see), and opted to use Vienna malt to get more of the color and some toasty flavors. I'd seen a lot of folks using Munich for this purpose, but at the time I didn't have any Munich. Vienna is kind of a lighter Munich. There's also a little wheat in there for head retention purposes.

Tilapia

Batch size: 12 gallons
Expected efficiency: 80%
Target OG: 1.061
Color: 7 SRM 

Grist:

• 17# Great Western 2-Row
• 4# Briess Vienna Malt
• 1# Briess White Wheat
• 1# Briess Crystal 60L Malt

Mash:

• Saccharification - 152°F for 60'
• Mash out - 168°F for 10'

Boil: 60 minutes total

• 2 oz. Mosaic (pellet, 11.7% aa) at 60' to 34 IBU
• 2 oz. Mosaic (pellet, 11.7% aa) at 15' to 17 IBU
• 2 oz. Mosaic (pellet, 11.7% aa) at 5' to 7 IBU

Fermentation:

• Chill to 65°F, pitch 2 satchets Fermentis US-05 dry ale yeast
• After 14 days, dry hop with 4 oz. Mosaic (pellet, 11.7% aa) for 5-7 days
• Crash-cool to 35°F and keg with Biofine Clear

Expected FG: 1.009 (6.9% ABV)

So you're probably wondering, "Tilapia?" Why did he name the beer after a fish? I didn't really set out to name it after a fish. I was just really not feeling very creative. It was a Mosaic IPA. Mosaics are often made with tile. Tile IPA. Tile IPA. Tilapia. I don't know, it just came to me. I'll take some consolation in the fact that I'm not the only one who named an IPA after a fish.

I ran into some issues right off the bat. I'm not sure what I did wrong, as I set my mill gap to the usual 0.043", but when I went to look at the grist, some of it was pretty much like flour. I was wondering if when I got toward the top of the bucket I was milling into some of the grain made several trips around the rollers because of not having anywhere to go. I didn't think it would be a big deal, but when I went to check on the mash after 60 minutes, I found it only trickling. A stuck mash! My first one! I grabbed my stainless spoon and stirred it up, figuring it would clear up again during the mash-out. For the most part, this is what happened.

As I was starting to reach my pre-boil volume, I took a few gravity readings and started to get nervous. Thinking I was going to miss my pre-boil gravity, I frantically looked for some DME. I didn't have anything except for dark DME, but I really didn't want to miss my gravity and I thought I might just need a little bit. I was hopeful that it wouldn't really affect the color. In the end, it did seem to darken the wort a bit, and I actually overshot the gravity by a few points. I probably didn't need the DME at all. Oh well. Live and learn, right? I guess this time the beer will be a little darker than last time.

I chilled the beer to pitching temp and then went to oxygenate the wort. But after 30-45 seconds, my oxygen cylinder ran out. I had only just enough time to oxygenate one of the fermentors. An unintended experiment! I didn't have time (or the energy) to run to the hardware store to pick up another oxygen cylinder so I went to my trusty old mix-stir for the second fermentor.

Pure oxygen. Gotta be careful with this stuff.

The trusty mix-stir.

Before you pitch your yeast it is a good idea to get some oxygen dissolved in your wort. In fact, along with making yeast starters and controlling fermentation temperatures, it's one of the three biggest things you can do to improve your beer. For beginners, usually shaking the carboy for a bit, or dumping the wort back and forth between buckets is a sufficient improvement. Boiling the wort causes a lot of the oxygen to escape (gases lose solubility in liquids when the liquids are warm), and the yeast need oxygen for the first phase of fermentation when they reproduce up to the cell count needed for the fermentation. Not having that oxygen there will cause your yeast to be stressed, and stressed yeast don't make the best beer. For a long time I used the mix-stir, attached to my trusty drill, to whip up the wort in the presence of air and dissolve as much oxygen as I could. It took about 2 minutes, was kind of fun, and effective enough. It was also important to mix the wort up because I used to do a lot of extract brewing, and you want that wort nice and homogenous before you take a gravity reading. The mix-stir killed two birds with one stone. Once I started doing all-grain, with higher gravity worts, and making lagers that really need a lot of healthy yeast, I decided to step up my game and buy an oxygenation kit that would let me dissolve pure oxygen from a disposable cylinder. With air, you can't really get beyond about 8 ppm oxygen in your wort. Wyeast labs has done the research and shown that you really want 10 or more ppm oxygen for optimal yeast health. The only way to achieve this is with pure oxygen and a diffusion stone. I labelled both fermentors with the method I used to aerate the wort, so when all is said and done, we can do a taste test to see if there's really a difference. I'm guessing we won't be able to tell due to the massive quantity of hops, but I guess that's the point of the experiment.

Which is which.

Finally, when everything was done, I gave my brewery a massive deep-clean. I recirculated about 20 gallons of hot PBW through the whole system, including the HERMS coil, mash tun, boil kettle, chiller, and wort pump. I do a pretty good job of cleaning everything up after each brew session, but this allowed me to get everything looking pretty much like new, which was very gratifying.

RECIRCULATE! RECIRCULATE!

Stay tuned for the next brew day report, which is going to be a German Pils with all home-grown hops!