We had a great time brewing the IPA on May 2nd!  A handful of people told me they wanted to come see the process, but when the grains went into the water, it was just me, Joe, and Ben watching the clock for the next ingredient to add.  Sandip was there for emotional support, but I get the impression he’s more interested in the final product…  If you’re interested in learning to make beer, come join us the next time!  It beats paying for classes or learning the hard way.

Here’s the recipe we used.  It’s based on the Yippee IPA from my favorite recipe book, the Homebrew’s Recipe Guide.  We went with all light malt extract instead of half-amber/half-light, added 2 lbs of honey, and messed with the hops a little lot.  This was the first brew that our cooling coil worked as expected, taking less than half an hour to get the temperatures down.  Not too shabby for $20 worth of copper tubing.  I collected the waste water and brought it right outside to water the grass, and all of our spent grains and hops went right into the compost pile.  No waste brewing!

It’s been in the carboy for just over a week now, and CO2 is still bubbling out slowly.  This weekend, we’ll be reracking it onto more hops and letting that sit for another week before bottling it up.  I had a smaller 1 gallon batch with some special ingredients that I put into growlers last night, and after a quick taste, it’s definitely what we were going for.  We’ll see how the big batch turns out soon enough!  Stay tuned for our next brew—we have to try another fruit beer for summer, since our last attempt, a cranberry wheat, left much to be desired.