SMaSH IPA Munich Simcoe
This brew is an experimental SMaSH, a single malt and single hop IPA, with Weyermann Munich Type 1 light malt and Simcoe hops. I’m doing it as part of a group challenge with my brewing club, the Kalamazoo Libation Organization of Brewers, or KLOB.
http://www.klob.org
The idea is to use one malt that can serve as a base malt and a single hop variety and to create a beer that accentuates the character of these two ingredients. The yeast is a standard, neutral, clean-fermenting ale yeast.
This is a 3 and a half gallon batch, which fits easily into my brew in a bag setup with a 9 gallon pot. I’ll mash for 75 minutes at 152 and then do a mash out.
A proper crush of the grain as well as raising the temp to 168 at mash out are important to get good efficiency.
At mash out, I lift the bag and drain it. I use just a little pressure on the bag to coax the liquid out. Too much squeezing will extract tannins.
I got a pre-boil gravity of 1.061, which was higher than the ten 54 expected. Mash efficiency was over 80%.
The bittering was done with 1 ounce of hops for 60 minutes.
I’m using late additions of the Simcoe hops to get a lot of flavor and aroma, attempting to use the chilling period to pump in 2 ounces of hops with some gentle stirring to extract and retain the volatile compounds. One addition was done at flame out and another after chilling the wort to 140. I let it stand at that temp for 20 minutes before chilling to 75 or so.
With everything out of the pot I manually create a whirlpool to create a cleaner edge to siphon the wort from. I like the clean beers I get by leaving some of the true behind. I leave about a quart and a half of true behind.
My Beersmith software is dialed in so that my volumes are pretty predictable. The batch yielded 3 and a half gallons into the fermenter.
Original gravity came out to ten 75 instead of the ten 69 predicted by my software. I’ll adjust the efficiency of my equipment profile to dial it in.
I pitched my entire 32 ounce yeast starter, which should be plenty of power for this ten 75 original gravity beer.
I’m using hardware store oxygen bottles with a regulator and diffusion stone from Bell’s General Store.
After ten days in primary and after the initial clearing, I racked this to a secondary and dry-hopped in two additional stages over ten days.
Bottled 22 days after brew day.