Home brewing an amazing New England style IPA (NEIPA)
For over 10 years I have been home brewing beer. In this video I will be brewing an amazing New England style IPA. To home brew this NEIPA I will use a lot of hops, including Cascade, Citra and Galena. Never have I used this many hops in one brew before. In addition I try to improve this wonderful home brewing session by using wet yeast for the first time.
Video transcript:
Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Tony Needs Hobbies. My name is Tony, and my name is Enrico, and today we converted the kitchen into a brewery because for the first time on this channel we are going to brew a beer and it will be a New England IPA. Have fun watching!
The beer that we are going to brew today will be my fortieth batch. Enrico and I are going to pull out all the stops to make this New England style IPA a fantastic brew. Some things that I will do differently from what I normally do to make this the best beer yet, are using a ton of hops at flame out and for dry hopping and using liquid yeast and a yeast starter. I’ll talk you through the details later. You can find the recipe for this beer in the description. It is loosely based on the recipe of Brewdog’s King of Eights version 2, to be found in their recipe e-book DIY Dog, also to be found in the description box.
You can see we started with the first step: milling the malts and grains. We will need pale malt, Munich malt, wheat malt and flaked oats. All of it, except for the oats, will go through the malt mill to crush the grains. Meanwhile we added some boiling water to the mash tun built out of a converted cooler to heat it up. Also, a big pot with 23 liters of water is heating up to 74 degrees Celcius on the big burner of the stove. We added a pH 5.2 buffer to keep the water at the ultimate pH for mashing.
When all the malts are crushed and milled, we remove the boiled water from the pre-heated mash tun so we can put the 23 liters of hot water in it. I used a calculator from brewersfriend.com to calculate the temperatures based on the amount of grains and mash thickness. If we add this all together, we should hit the mashing temperature of 67 degrees Celsius. Guess what? We totally hit the right temperature. That’s why I love the brewersfriend.com calculators. Now we let it sit for around 75 to 90 minutes to be sure that all the starches are converted into sugars.
When I started brewing beer quite a few years ago, I always did a starch conversion test using a tincture of iodine. During the first twenty batches or so, the outcome of the test was always negative so now I do not bother to test anymore and go straight into filtering the wort into my kettle. The first two liters will be very cloudy so they will go back into the mash tun to be filtered again.
When it is completely drained I will add another 19 liters of water at 78 degrees Celsius for sparging. It will get a good stir and then it will sit for 15 minutes before draining into the kettle. I will end up with around 30 liters in the kettle. Again, the first two liters will go back so the beer will get more clear. However, a New England style IPA can and probably will be cloudy so that’s not a big problem.
Alright, we finished mashing. Now let’s bring it up to a boil, add the hops and in the meantime enjoy this home brewed English Ale.
Using the biggest burner of the stove the wort will be boiling in no time. While it is heating up we measure the hops. This New England IPA requires almost 500 grams of hops. I am using 60 grams cascade as a bittering hop, 60 grams of each of cascade, citra and galena at flame out. Four days in the fermentation I will add 70 grams of each to the fermenter for dry hopping. I have never used that large amount of hops in a brew ever before, so I hope this beer will be amazingly good!
After adding the bittering hops we will let it boil for 75 minutes. Then the cascade, citra and galena aroma hops are added at flame out and I will also put the copper wort chiller in the boiling liquid to sterilize it. Then we let cold water run through it to chill the wort down to 20 degrees Celsius before adding the yeast.
While the wort is chilling I take the yeast starter out of the fridge so it can come to room temperature. For the first time I decided to use liquid yeast as it should improve the quality of the beer and I want this fortieth batch to be my best batch yet. I am going for the classic strain for New England style IPAs: Wyeast 1318 London Ale III. To get enough vital cells I also made a starter for the first time. It went really well, so I will make a separate video about that process soon, as well as a video on how you can confirm that your fermentation is finished, in order to prevent exploding bottles…
Anyway, before adding the yeast, a quick check on the original gravity. It’s right where it was expected at 1.064 so we can add the yeast and let the yeastie beasts do their job in a dark and cool room in the house.
We have enjoyed our day of brewing and drinking beer. After four days I will add the hops for dry-hopping and then we have to wait a couple of weeks before the beer is fermented out. We sure hope that you have enjoyed this video and if you did, don’t forget to hit the like button and please subscribe to this channel if you want to see more brewing videos in the future.
For now, I would like to thank you for watching. Bye, bye!
