Imperial Yeast GeB give away

[robbym123]

I took advantage of the GeterBrewed imperial yeast away recently.

Along with a couple of kg of hops and some caramalt I chose the 'Dry Hop' variety.

For various reasons I haven't got around to using it until now, but tomorrow is brew day, so a starter is on the go......

First impressions are great, air lock activity after about 3 hours. I had split the pack between 2 demijohns, each with 3l of 1.040 DME . By this morning the Krausen was at the top of each demijohn - better make sure I leave plenty of space in the fermenters.

The plan is to make a 100l split brew, one half will be an IPA of about 6.5%, kind of based on a beefed up SNPA recipe. I'll add some Citra (and other's yet to be decided) as dry hop.

The other half will be a watered down version, without the Citra, but possibly with some cascade dry hops, idea being to get somewhere close to Dark Star Hophead.

Hopefully these will both be in their prime at Xmas/new year.

Will add to this thread as I brew, ferment, bottle and drink.

 

[robbym123]

Brew day complete. All went smoothly apart from the pale crystal malt I was using. I expected 2 kg of pale crystal and 25kg of low colour base malt to give me a golden colour wort. Instead I got a dark red/brown colour, more like a best bitter colour.

I suspect I have been sold the wrong crystal deritive, grrrrr!.

Anyways ended up with 2 60l fermenters full, one at 1.068, the other at 1.042, for a daytime version.

Recipe as follows

25kg low colour malt
2kg 'light' crystal
4 oz magnum @60
4 oz Perle @ 30
6oz cascade @10
12oz cascade @ 0
8oz Citra @ 0
4oz aurora @ 0

Imperial dry hop yeast stepped up using 6l of starter

I will dry hop the light version with 4oz of cascade and the IPA version with 6oz if Citra and 4oz of simcoe.

The only thing I noticed about the yeast was that it had already packed down really nice and tightly in the starter demijohns.

After about 3hrs there was already some tentative airlock activity.

Good signs so far

 

[foxbat]

I suspect I have been sold the wrong crystal deritive, grrrrr!.

That's happened twice to me so far. It pays to have some known good crystal malts around so you can compare grain colours.