|BACKGROUND|

Slightly topical with the season, albeit a little late.

Initially, my father had approached me with the idea that he wanted to do a batch of beer for his Christmas party at work. He was leaning towards doing something on the IPA side, but he wasn’t totally sure how he wanted to make it more festive in the holiday spirit. I told him to brainstorm some ideas and let me know if there were any specific ingredients that he wanted to use. He ended up coming back with one – cranberries.

Now, to me, cranberries have a definite Thanksgiving vibe, rather than Christmas, but I get it. They’re still relevant to the season, what with wreaths and all. On the other hand, wreaths are very Christmas, and I happen to know someone who has giant spruce trees in the back yard (spoiler: it’s my dad). I offered up the option of doing a cranberry-spruce IPA for the holiday, which honestly sounded pretty legit. Maybe too legit.

With my flair for the dramatic, I wasn’t content with stopping at just that. I didn’t feel like making “just another IPA”, even though this clearly falls out of the bounds of the norm, so I decided to push it even further: rye and a ton of hops. Specifically, seven different varietals.

I think the first thing that I want to get out of the way is that I know this isn’t an original idea. Not even the name, let alone the concept of “hurr durr, seven hops and rye, let’s make a Queen reference”. I’m willing to blame it on the fact that I was also drinking a lot of Vault Brewing Co.’s 5 C’s hops and put two and two together, albeit a few years behind like 90% of the brewing world, as I also don’t generally like using more than 2-3 hops in a beer.

At the same point, a good number of those beers are on the older side or are actually just retired (like Goose Island’s).

Regardless, in the end, this is a beer of my own design, and I’d like to think it at least differentiates itself from any predecessors one the myriad of aspects I twisted to leave my finger prints into (honestly) this mess of an idea. A large part of that comes from the choice of the hops. Admittedly, it inescapable to use the frequent fliers of the old skool hops: Columbus, Centennial, Chinook, Cascade, and Citra – the usual suspects. While they might be more OG in the hoppy beer world (minus Citra, which is still a relative newcomer), they’re so common place in the hoppy beer scene and historically replete that it’s undeniable that they are some goddamn workhorses. Hell, even Vinny Cilurzo utilizes two of them in Pliny the Elder – Columbus and Centennial (with a li’l help from ol’ cat piss Simcoe).

On the other hand, in the last 4-5 years, there’s been an explosion of flavor (but not Glennwads) in the world of hops. The two newer varietals that I chose to round out my paltry offering was Calypso and Cashmere, with Calypso, two-stepping in with some jazz hands and tropical, pear/apple, and citrus tones while Cashmere slides in on a Jimmy Paige riff of lemon, lime, and melon.

Looking at this objectively, this seems like it was going one of two ways: either a clusterfuck of hops caught in a power struggle or a fantastic Willy Wonka-esque orgy of fruit and pine in the mouth, with no middle ground for error.

While my dad had initially thought about doing something NE-style, I was leery that a brown-ish haze bomb with some cranberry blush thrown into the mix would end up looking like a puce NE-style shartbomb, which makes me gag slightly re-reading what I wrote. Instead, I managed to cajole him into doing a more traditional West Coast style IPA, saying that the spruce would work better in that style. Not entirely a lie, just self-serving in nature.

So, that brings us to the brew day of a Spruce Cranberry Rye IPA with seven different strains of hops. May God have mercy on my soul.

Them Digits

Batch Size: 5.5 gallons

Mash Temp: 152F for 60 min.

Boil Time: 60 min.

Batch Efficiency: 60%

Original Gravity: 1.054 // 14.8 P

Final Gravity: 1.010 // 2.6 P

Estimated ABV: 5.8%

IBUs: 72

Color: 8.4 EBC // 16.5 SRM (without fruit+)

Recipe

Malts

6# Pearl | 43%

3# Malted Rye | 21%

2# White Wheat | 14%

2# Malted Oats |14%

.5# Crystal 60| 4%

.5# Turbinado Sugar | 4%

Hops

1 oz. Columbus @ 60 min.

1 oz. Chinook @ 10 min.

1 oz. Citra @ Hop Steep (170F for 10 min.)

1 oz. Cascade @ Hop Steep (170F for 10 min.)

1 oz. Cashmere @ Dryhop (3 days)

1 oz. Calypso @ Dryhop (3 days)

1 oz. Centennial @ Dryhop (3 days)

Yeast

Wyeast 1318 (London III)

Spices and Stuff

1 tablet Whirlfloc @ 15 min

1 tsp Pectic Enzyme (Pectinase)

.75# Cranberries (puree in primary)

.75# Spruce Branches (split, .25# in mash water, .5# in mash tun)

|BREW LOG|

On the eve of Thanksgiving, I started a lofty goal: 3 brew sessions within 24 hours. This was the first.

It was colder than a witch’s tit and by the time we even got started at around 4:30 pm, the sun was starting to set on the suburban Pennsylvania horizon. It was windy, cold, and just all around miserable conditions for brewing.

I’m done putting pictures of what milling grains looks like because, let’s face it, they almost all look the same minus the color. I had gotten down to my dad’s a bit earlier, around 1:30, to which I milled the three batches’ worth of grains and separated them all into neatly marked buckets for when they were needed. Past that, I also had one last ingredient I needed to acquire: the spruce.

It wasn’t that labor intensive to go out into the back yard and cut off some boughs. It seems that the ideal season for harvesting spruce tips had past already, which is typically Spring, like May-ish. This made me curious how Dogfish is getting them sweet, sweet spruce jawns for a November release of Pennsylvania Tuxedo, but I suppose you could just buy them like a filthy casual and not be a rustic pioneer. Regardless, when you face adversity: Adapt. Improvise. Overcome. Spruce branches, in lieu of tips, it was.

I ended up pulling an Ale Apothecary and just using the straight up branches, Norwegian-style. Granted, I didn’t make my own mash/lauter tun out of a big ass tree, but I did follow a similar method to their madness in that I put a quarter pound of spruce in the mash water and put another half pound in the bottom of my mash tun (converted igloo cooler). The liquor and the proceeding wort smelled nice and sprucey, which is what I was looking for.

Now, I took this as my last chance of doing some experimentation. I’ve had some issues with coming in lower than I should with gravities in the past few batches, and I had begun thinking that it was my sparge technique, which was a shitty extended sparge where I gently doled out the water with a measuring cup. In subsequent batches, I’m just going to batch sparge as I’m for sure that this is the culprit for most of my undershooting the gravity woes. Despite hitting pretty much my desired mash temp (I wanted 152F, but I’ll take 151F), the pH was way off (I’m blaming the spruce) and, after sparging, I checked the pre-boil gravity and it was seriously low. Like .010 points low. I’m officially batch sparging from now on. Way easier and I get a much better efficiency.

During the mash, I had to prepare a quick batch of cranberry sauce. It was only seasonally appropriate, but I also wasn’t making it for dinner. I also wasn’t adding any sugar too it either. I would definitely not call it a puree, because it was chunky/lumpy as shit, but it was a super nice, Ocean Spray gastrique. Mashed after a slight boil, the crandberries were a little more pink than the red that I expected. But the flavor was great, so I was excited to see how that’d play out. After letting it cool with the lid on, I poured it into the primary fermenter.

Boil was relatively uneventful, as I’d prefer it to be, especially when I’m trying to not be outside as much as possible. Only two additions of hops, one at the beginning of the boil and one at the tail, followed by a 15 minute hop steep while holding the temperature of the brew at 170F. While not ultimately difficult, the holding temp during 25 degree weather is slightly harder than during the Spring or Summer. I had to re-light the bruner twice to pump it back up into the realm of 165-170F twice.

After that, it was a matter of finishing the chill down to 70F and racking the wort into the carboy and on top of the cranberry sauce (that’s what we’re going with here). At this point, it was almost pitch black and even colder than it was when we started. Pitched one satchel of Wyeast London III with a tsp of Pectic enzyme and sent the brew on its merry way.

Upon going down to check on the beer the next day, I was surprised with the fact that the cranberries had been kicked up into solution during fermentation and the beer was red. At this point, I started to freak out. Not because I was worried something was wrong, more of a “god fucking dammit” freak out because I’m not trying to have a “Red Period” like Picasso in brewing beers. This was supposed to be a nice light amber West Coast IPA. After the last beer turning out red (instead of purple) and the fact that I was brewing essentially a Flanders-esqe sour red the next day, I just wanted my beers to not be red when I didn’t want them to be, but luckily they settled out and I was left with the nice amber/gold color I was looking for. Another few days of rigorous fermentation then followed.

Fermentation slowed after a few days and the beer got to relax for about a week until a solid bottling day was determined. Three days beforehand, the 3 oz. hop depth charge was fired into the fermenter. After two days, it got dosed with 2 Tbsp of gelatin (in 1 cup of water), for fining.

On bottling day, I collected a full 5 gallons of beer and made a simple syrup with 4.2 oz. of sugar (little less than 2/3 cup) for a desired CO2 level of 2.4 vol. And then we played the waiting game.

Tasting Notes

Originally, I thought this was going to be my albatross around the neck, the “Creep” to my Radiohead, the Manhattan to my Woody Allen, and the Florentine Pieta to my Michelangelo.

Pours a nice amber/golden color, which is still pretty opaque despite fining with gelatin, and more than necessary, at that. Slightly off-white head and some solid lacing on its way down the glass. Aromas of fruit and pine, with a hint of spice.

When I was tasting it at bottling, I got a weird, slightly off flavor at the back of my palate that I chalked up to it being a green IPA and that I generally don’t enjoy them without carbonation and right out of the fermenter, and this is an issue that has persisted for years, even into my professional brewing career. In the same boat, it seems I would not be alone in getting some sort of weird, unidentifiable “off flavor” while using spruce/juniper.

I get almost all of the flavors I wanted, but it ended up being close the aforementioned clusterfuck I didn’t want. There’s certainly the piney-resiny backbone, but I honestly can’t tell if it’s from the hops or the spruce, which also mingles with the rye, but I do get that light, almost smoky flavor from the branches. There’s the fruity bouquet on the nose from the dryhopping, which actually gives it a bit of a NE-style flair from the hops I used. Even then, I don’t even get that lightly astringent cranberry tartness, despite being in contact for a little over two weeks with the fruit. They get a little steamrolled by the hops. At the back of the palate, there’s a nice, slightly lingering bitterness, complimented by how the rye hits with the spiciness as well.

The light malty sweetness marries pretty perfectly with the bitterness and the play well together. While I like the London III in my more fruit forward IPAs, I think that the more neutral quality of California Ale might have been a bit better in this scenario. It’s jsut a little more fruity than I wanted and I think the yeast profile plays a small part of that. Also, LIII is slightly less flocculant than CA, which might have helped with clarifying a bit more in the appearance as well. Either that, or my dad put the gelatin in the wrong beer.

Is it a drainpour? No, but it’s not really the West Coast IPA I wanted. It’s more just a pretty solid, unoffensive pale ale that treads on the line of IPA. Unfortunately, that’s not what I was going for, so to me, this is still somewhat of a failure. It’s not going to be a giant scarlet letter that I refuse to acknowledge, like some GoT “Snow” beer, but it’s not a feather in my cap. Still, it was good enough for Christmas gifts, and other people seemed to like it a lot. Perhaps I’m just being too critical of my own work. I feel like a large part of this is that the beer flies in the face of every angle I typically approach designing/brewing from. It’s a glut of hops, and orgy of grains, and so many adjuncts that I would never have truly added on my own. Still, better than brewing a pumpkin pie beer.