Brewing an IPA to last/age

[Chris17]

Hello. I just wondered if anyone had any ideas/advice/recipes on how to brew an all grain West Coast style IPA with a good amount of bitterness and hop flavor that would still taste great when not so fresh?

I'm expecting my first child in April so am likely going to have to wind down on the brewing in a couple of months. I'd quite like to brew a nice refreshing IPA that could be enjoyed in the summer before I stop so just wondering if anyone had any tips to prevent loss of hop flavor whilst it is stored? I was thinking of just overdoing the late additions and dry hops in the hope that they calm down and mellow out whilst storing, but not really sure how this would work? I thought a West Coast style would be more likely to stand up to the test of time than an East Coast!!

 

[Sadfield]

Congrats.

Oxygen and temperature are your enemy. So, storing as cool as possible is vital for longevity.

Reducing oxygen pickup after pitching yeast will help. In respect to this I would not dry hop in the normal way as it adds an extra process, post fermentation. I'd add a moderate dry hop addition at the time of pitching yeast instead. Using pellets straight into the fv. By the end of fermentation they will have dropped out into the trub.

Hop additions at all stages of the boil (60/60/15/0 minute additions) give a more stable flavour in my experience.

I'd probably go with classic choice of a combination from citra, centennial, simcoe, cascade. And then add in some Mosaic, as it has good all round flavour profile of berries, citrus, papaya, floral that'll fill the flavour out.

 

[DocAnna]

All a bit theoretical but Ascorbic acid would seem to help preserve flavour and I'm adding it to all my brews, but as @Sadfield says, it's oxygen that's most of the problem so anything to reduce this, and avoid shaking/agitation of the bottles. I've gone on at a bit of length about this previously - probably a bit too much detail!

Quick edit to say that I'll be revising that amount down .

At dry hop: Ascorbic acid (vitamin C) 0.72g per litre of head space mixed with the hops and added to wort
= 10g for a 14 litre headspace on a 21 litre batch in a 35 litre fermenter

This is based on worst case scenario for the amount of oxygen introduced at dry hop and should leave some left over to scavenge oxygen at bottling.

Anna

(the science bit for the calculation:

This paper goes some way to explain why the idea of bottle priming consuming the oxygen through fermentation is a bit of a myth - as is empirically demonstrated in the experiment shown in the video earlier on this thread. It also shows how ascorbic acid is consumed faster and before the earlier antioxidants naturally occurring in beer such as from hops, so protects over a short time. Notably copper trace elements catalyse this reaction, which is of benefit rather than a problem as erroneously reported on another forum as ascorbic acid accelerating oxidation. The evidence is that the ascorbic acid is oxidised faster with copper trace element but ahead of other natural antioxidants.
http://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0cf0/53f6b4f7d88d576eda3ae0ca65a927a91d90.pdfThe oxygen in the headspace is consumed through oxidation within a few minutes (less than 10) far before fermentation could consume it over a few days.
Also that 10 to 50 molecules of oxygen are consumed for each molecule of ascorbic acid.

This paper makes the case for flavour stability with vitamin C added to cooled wort at 30mg/l
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/j.2050-0416.2007.tb00252.x
Balancing this with the merit of oxygen at the initial pitch on the exponential growth phase of yeast, and that flavour stability is sought with the final beer rather than initial wort, the time for addition for most benefit would be at dry hopping.

At dry hop: Ascorbic acid 0.72g per litre of head space mixed with the hops and added to wort
= 10g for a 14 litre headspace on a 21 litre batch in a 35 litre fermenter
This is based on 14 litres headspace at 1 bar (standard atmospheric pressure) having 0.574 mol of ideal gas at 20 deg C
https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/ideal-gas-lawIf at the time of dry hopping all the headspace were replaced by air as the worst case scenario at oxygen 21% would mean
7.264 x10^22 molecules of oxygen, which would require a 10th to a 50th of the same number of molecules of ascorbic acid to consume the oxygen. With the mole mass of ascorbic acid of 176.12g/mol that translates to 10 to 2 g of ascorbic acid (0.72 g per litre of headspace at most). While the amount of air will increase at lower temperature, it is a relatively small change in density at the range of fermenting temperatures (translating to a difference of 0.07g for air at 10 deg C) so the temperature difference can be effectively disregarded for the air temperature.

Based on 99.8% purity of purchasable ascorbic acid the mass to be added can be taken without adjustment for fillers:
https://www.intralabs.co.uk/ascorbi...qdsAUAsCNrAtzsI5twdEW_-OU7sxvq4RoCbWgQAvD_BwE)

 

[Scrattajack]

Regarding oxygen, maybe these crown caps would be of interest.

 

[Chris17]

Thanks for the suggestions! I might give Ascorbic acid a try and dry hopping when pitching definitely sounds like a good idea!

Regarding oxygen, maybe these crown caps would be of interest.

These sound very interesting. Have you used them before?

 

[Scrattajack]

Have you used them before?

No, I discovered them just after I'd bottled a batch of Oatmeal Stout otherwise I would have. I don't think it's a gimmick though, oxygen scavenging is an established technique in the world of commercial packaging. At £2.00 it'd be worth a punt, especially if you didn't have to have them in light blue.

 

[MrRook]

Hop the holy heck out of it. In the 1800s IPA brewers hopped so much that it was undrinkable for many months, and would age them up to a year before shipping them to India.
A few years ago I did an online extra for Zymurgy where I replicated an IPA and a porter from that era. On paper the IPA had nearly 200 IBUs. I bottled at nine months and it was pretty good.

 

[Kiwigaz]

If you are planning to prime and bottle your beer? then the yeast should deal with any oxygen introduced at that stage. Should be good for 6 months easy. As others have said high temperature is your enemy when it comes to long term storage

 

[Cheyne_brewer]

Could I recommend the excellent book IPA by Mitch Steele. It covers all aspects of IPA brewing, both historic and modern. Has a few recipes. There’s plenty of info on hopping rates and maturation along with water treatment and other technical details.