Owner’s Obsession – IPA

I’ve had bad luck with all the IPA variations I’ve tried so far, so I wanted to take a shot at building my own recipe. I looked at some pale ale recipes that looked good, and then bumped up the grain and hops to push this into the IPA style. I started peppering in whatever leftover grains I had on hand (Victory, CaraMunich II, and Caramel 40L) and made due with the hops leftover from previous batches (Centennial, Citra, Falconer’s Flight, Cascade, and Columbus). I used a British Ale yeast strain (WLP005) which I already had a starter going for.

Since my main hop additions were Falconer’s Flight, I was hoping this would really highlight that hop, but it really didn’t. The British yeast took forever to flocculate, so during the peak freshness of the beer, it had a pretty severe yeast haze. I wouldn’t use this yeast again for that reason alone.

The name comes from my obsession with IPAs. I also hope it will be a mainstay of the brewery, so inserting the brewery’s name seemed like a good idea.

Overall, I really like this beer, and will be brewing it again switching the WLP005 for the WLP001, and also lessening the first hop addition to lower the overall bitterness. I also want to change the base malt from German Pilsener to 50% 2-row, and 50% Munich to give it some more body.

Brew Date: November 22, 2012
Kegged On: December 9, 2012
O.G.: 1.053
F.G.: 1.017
ABV: 4.7%