|BACKGROUND|

This brew log is alternatively subtitled: Happy Birthday to Me, or How I Accidentally Brewed My First Triple IPA.

For some reason, I fell back into the mood to revisit the milkshake IPA phenomenon. Couldn’t actually give you a good reason but, since I was going to do it, I was going to do it big. And what better way to do that than celebrate my birthday. I mean, it’s not exactly anything landmark, just #28. But I had conceptualized the idea for this beer quite a few months prior. What exactly was there to stop me from making a birthday beer with a literal birthday cake in it?

The first line of thought was deciding which type of cake. I have admittedly strange taste in that department, seeing that I’m a big fan of Boston Creme Pies, which is a departure from the traditional argument of chocolate or vanilla. However, if we’re picking seconds, then everyone knows that funfetti white cake with a vanilla buttercream frosting is clearly the superior choice to either of the two aforementioned options.

Now, the cake part was easy. I’ve got a solid hook-up at my local grocery store in the form of a tiny, portly gentlemen with a chef’s hat and penchant for giggling. For under $2, the deal was sealed, and I walked away with a box of Pilsbury’s funfetti cake mix, because real recognize real and I don’t get down with Betty Crocker. That smile is shady.

While I do enjoy cooking a great deal, I typically don’t dabble too much in the baking aspect, partly because it typically requires a good deal of practice and following recipes (which I am not the best at) and partly because ovens are hot and I am a delicate flower who doesn’t like heat. But, even someone like myself can mix a box with 3 other ingredients, pour them into a/multiple pans, and still make a pretty dece cake. Of course, I did make two cakes, because layering is classy. Also, I figured it’d make for a slightly more impressive photo op.

However, the real issue was the frosting. As most people are familiar with, oil is the enemy of head retention. This presents an issue, seeing as icing typically has a lot of oils in it, especially buttercream, which is aptly named. So, I took to the interwebs to see what sort of answers I could dig up. First hit on google for “fat-free frosting” was sufficient enough.

Sugary Winzy has a very simple recipe consisting of five ingredients: sugar, vanilla, water, a pinch of cream of tartar, and eggs. Honestly, the only real catch in this iteration of frosting is the egg part, but as a protein, even if any made it into the boil, it would just denature and settle out. At least, that’s what my logic told me. The pastry chef at work assured me that I also needed to be stringent about hitting the specific temperatures for the sugar in the recipe, as baking is as scientifically specific as brewing is. The frosting came out a little more like a fancy marshmallow creme, as I don’t think I quite whipped the egg whites enough, but it was like 10:30 at night and I don’t hate my neighbors. I ended up with a massive yield of frosting as well, estimating it was something close to 40 to 45 oz. of frosting (volume wise, about 5-6 cups worth), and that’s just ballparking on the fact that I filled a 28 oz. Chinese Tupperware container to the brim and still had another 2 cups worth that I attempted to eat straight, because fuck it, I wasn’t going to waste frosting, it’s like the best part of the cake. My heart was in the right place, but my stomach was having none of that. Into the trash it went.

Even the next day, which was brew day, the cake assembly went… iight. Because the frosting was more on the thinner side, it didn’t exactly make a great middle layer and kinda ran down the cake too. In my defense, I’m not on Ace of Cakes, but this was closer to something on Nailed It. I still didn’t use the entire 28 oz of frosting in the container, I maybe managed to get a hair over half of it on the cake, so we can estimate somewhere about 2 cups worth (16 fl oz.) actually did make it into the final beer. I placed the cake in the fridge to help keep the icing from sliding off the cake and getting everywhere.

After that, it was brewing time.

Them Digits

Batch Size: 6 gallons

Mash Temp: 150 F for 60 min.

Boil Time: 60 min.

Batch Efficiency: 94%

Original Gravity: 1.096 // 22.9 P

Final Gravity: 1.025 // 6.3 P

Estimated ABV: 10.3%

IBUs: ~83 IBU (38 IBU from boil, plus at least 45 potential IBUs from “whirlpool” addition)

Color: 12.6 EBC // 6.4 SRM

Recipe

Malts

10# Pearl Malt | 67%

2# Golden Naked Oats | 12%

1.5# Sugar (estimated, from cake + frosting) | 10%

1# White Wheat | 7%

.25# Lactose | 2%

Hops

1 oz. Chinook @ 60 | 38 IBU

1 oz. Galaxy @ “whirlpool” | 18(?) IBU

1 oz. Amarillo @ “whirlpool” | 16(?) IBU

1 oz. Calypso @ ‘whirlpool” | 11(?) IBU

1 oz. Galaxy @ dryhop #1, 3 days contact | 0 IBU

1 oz. Calypso @ dryhop #1, 3 days contact | 0 IBU

1 oz. Cashmere @ dryhop #1, 3 days contact | 0 IBU

1 oz. Mosaic @ dryhop #1, 3 days contact | 0 IBU

1 oz. Galaxy @ dryhop #2, 3 days contact | 0 IBU

1 oz. Calypso @ dryhop #2, 3 days contact | 0 IBU

1 oz. Cashmere @ dryhop #2, 3 days contact | 0 IBU

1 oz. Mosaic @ dryhop #2, 3 days contact | 0 IBU

Yeast

1200 mL starter of yeast blend harvest from Tired Hands and Trillium cans, fermented @ ~70F

Spices and Stuff

1 Funfetti Cake, baked & frosted @ mash (made from Pilsbury Funfetti Boxed Mix & 1/2 volume of fat-free frosting recipe)

2 Pink Lady Apples, peeled and chopped @ 40, removed at 15

1 vanilla bean, soaked in vodka @ dryhop, 3 days contact

Water Shit

4 mL 88% Lactic Acid

2 tsp CaCl

|BREW LOG|

Now, I have to take you all back 3 days before the actual brewday, before I get too far ahead of myself. For the few previous batches, I had encountered a mix-up on when grains would arrive or if they would arrive late and my delivery date from UPS or FedEx actually kept fluctuating. Thinking I was going to get fucked on this, and considering that I had actually taken a day off work for the brew day, I doubled down and ordered another emergency batch from a different site that I knew would get to me in time (The woes of when your LHBS doesn’t carry what you like to use). Of course, both shipments came before the brew day, so I had essentially ordered two times as much as I had needed. That was fine, I’d just use it for subsequent batches.

Knowing that I had everything I needed, the following brew day a month later was just gonna be a walk in the park, especially since I had everything I needed already. That is, until I realized days before the brew day that I hadn’t gotten any yeast for the IPA. I had some packets of US-04, but I needed that for the gose I was also brewing and, from prior experience, us-04 is also highly flocculent, which doesn’t loan itself well to NEIPAs. So, in all my thriftiness (thank you, Boy Scouts), I pulled together a quick starter, harvesting a wonderful melange of yeast from two, multiple month old cans of Tired Hands’ We Are All Energy Vibrating at the Same Frequency and Trillium’s Mettle. I was slightly nervous at first, after not seeing much activity from the 1L starter for the first 2 days, but by the time brewday rolled around, it was alive and kicking,

The core recipe for this beer isn’t entirely too far out of the woods for what I’d consider the “typical NEIPA starter pack” of Fawcett Pearl malt, GNO, and wheat. The 13# of grain fits comfortably inside my mash cooler. While we were milling the grains, I started heating 5 gallons water up to roughly 165F, adding in an extra gallon to compensate for what I thought the cake might need, since, to be frank, I have no idea whatsoever the absorption rate is for cake vs. grains is, aside from high. At this point, I also added in my water chems.

Looking at the grist, you’ll notice a lack of rice hulls. Every once in a while, even the most experienced of brewers makes a dumb fucking move. Adding in the grains like normal, everything was just peachy. The cake, however… was a different story. I do typically mash on the slightly thicker side (1.25 q/# vs 1.33 q/#), but goddamn if that cake didn’t just turn the regular oatmeal of a mash into a super thick oatmeal. I also didn’t factor in the temperature of the cake, which had been refrigerated, so while I was initially shooting for something closer to 152F, I ended up coming in slightly lower at 150F. Still acceptable for an IPA, but I was banking on there being some residual sugars. After all, at this point, I was still under the impression that I was making a double IPA.

After 10 minutes, I scooped up a nice, gloppy sample of the mash to do a pH reading to see where we were at and it came in at 5.5, which is slightly high, but still under the 5.6 threshold for what is “acceptable”. From there, I give it my best shot at a stir and let the grains rest for the remainder of the hour.

I approached the beer casually, started pulling the first runnings to vorlauf like usual, until I slowly began to notice that the wort was coming out slowly. Looking up, I noticed that the wort was essentially just pooling atop the grainbed, giving me the starkest indication possible: I had dun fucked up and we had ourselves a stuck mash. The only kicker being that, while taking inventory of what grains I had on hand earlier that brewday, I had even looked at the rice hulls and called them little bitches. Today was the day I remembered every other stuck mash I had experienced as a brewer, similar to a ‘Nam flashback.

I ended up figuring out that if I stuck the mash paddle under the brew bag (which I line my mash tun with, game changer), I could prevent the almost non-Newtonian fluid from forming a perfect seal around my drain tube and the wort would come out, albeit at a painfully slow pace. After what seemed like eternity, combined with multiple instances of lifting and slapping the sack of soaking wet grains and mushed cake, I called what we had gotten, which was a surprising 2.5 gallons. I was done, it was time to sparge.

Unfortunately, this did not fare any better. With the grain/cake mixture still being overly swole, the extra 6 gallons of water for sparging filled my cooler almost to the brim. With some very gentle stirring, I put the lid back on and gave the mash another 10 minutes to reform the grain bed, or at least what little I could get it to do. Cue another 45 minutes of swearing, jerry-rigging, and finagling the bag to get everything to drain properly and we ended up collecting a solid 7 gallons of wort in the kettle. Curious to see where we stood after that Sisyphean endeavor, I took a small sample for pre-boil to see where exactly we were sitting with the cake, since I wasn’t 100% sure how to factor that into my recipe calculator outside of using the “turbinado sugar” item. While the sample chilled in the freezer, I brought the 7 gallons of wort to a boil.

The initial bittering charge of Chinook went in at the start of the boil because, despite recognizing that most NEIPAs don’t do that, I still like a beer with some bitterness to it. On the other hand, that was also the only addition that I was going to put in the boil. 20 minutes later, I added in two peeled and chopped Pink Lady apples, bundled neatly in a hop bag. Jean over at Tired Hands has been pretty transparent over the fact that the milkshake series uses green apple puree to inflict permahaze on their beers, so it’s a habit I’ve picked up if I want the Floccboi Haze™ to be particularly pervasive in a batch.

With no extra additions to the boil until flame out, I turned my attention back to the pre-boil sample that was now amply cooled down for a reading. To both my shock and dismay, the initial reading came in at a whopping 1.082, which was well above what I had even estimated as a final gravity! Based on the adjustments I had done on the mill before the prior batch that day, I was expecting a similar 4% efficiency boost. Trying to calculate back what might have happened, the numbers I came up with were that I had actually gotten a 26% efficiency boost, landing at 94%. While I was, on one hand, excited that it had happened, on the other hand, I now had to adapt on the fly and figure out how to deal with the newly upgraded triple IPA. Also, it straight up tasted like cakey, vanilla goodness, so win-win?

Since I knew that the beer was going to (hopefully) finish at a higher gravity than was initially expected, I tried to figure out how to adapt what my idea was for the beer. That meant I wanted to bump up the IBUs a little to help balance it out. Well, as much as I could. I had a small trick in my back pocket that I had picked up from a brewer friend I know. His little method that he had figured out to make some really nice IPAs was that, instead of hopping at any time during the boil, he’d actually just push a huge depth charge of hops in right at flame out while he started to push the wort out of the kettle and into the fermenter. Calling it a whirlpool would be slightly incorrect, as it essentially gets minimal contact time, but with the lessening amount of wort in the kettle getting more and more isomerization during the knockout. I decided that was going to be my best bet.

At flame out, I dropped in my 3 oz. of aroma hops and turned on the pump for my chiller. Since this is an admittedly nebulous way to try and gauge any sort of efficiency from the hops, I’m going to use the fact that the wort was in no way over 180F for more than 3-5 minutes, meaning that I’d only have isomerized the alpha acids in the hops for a few minutes before the temperature reached my usual hop steep preference of under 180F. Using my brewing software, my best estimates for the IBUs from that are up top.

After getting the wort all chilled down to a lovely 68F, I began racking over into my fermenter, pulling a sample for a gravity reading, and getting ready to oxygenate the wort and pitch the yeast. Knowing that it was also now going to be a bruiser, I upped the amount of oxygen that I used for the batch, opting for 90 seconds of pure O2 in lieu of the typical 60 for “regular” sized beers. Upon taking a hydrometer reading, the original gravity was officially 1.096 (1.094, adjusted), meaning that I was going to have to wild shit going on with this one. I got almost a full 6 gallons of wort in the fermenter and pitched the entire 1L starter into it, all but ensuring I’d get as much out of the beer as possible.

The beer took about a week and a half to fully calm down, and after no signs of airlock activity, a gravity reading showed that it was coming it at 1.025 (1.024, adjusted), a casual 10.3% alcohol. Luckily, with that high of an ABV, I would have actually been a bit more worried if it had gone any lower. With that, a bottling date was set and a schedule for dryhopping was set up. First round of the 4 oz. bags went in, got 3 days contact, then was pulled and replaced with the second round of 4 oz. of hops, as well as a whole vanilla bean, which had been cut in half and soaked in vodka for 2 days. That also received 3 days of contact time, which lead up to bottling day.

With the small amount of loss due to trub and from dryhopping, we ended up with roughly 5.5 gallons of beer, and it smelled exactly like the pre-boil gravity did, just even more amped up on the cake factor and super hoppy. I suppose dryhopping with half a pound of hops will do that. Gravity still clocked in at the same measurement, meaning that fermentation had been officially completed. In the graduated cylinder, the beer just glowed, that beautiful, hazy, NEIPA color was spot on. I mean, it was bitter as hell, but that’s my bias on not being able to drink green beer, especially the DDH stuff being super fresh.

As per the method, I made a simple syrup priming solution using 4.24 oz. (~.6 cups) of sugar into a cup of water. Being careful to minimize aeration as much as possible, we racked the beer into the bottling bucket and, 2+ cases capped and labeled later, it was off to wait for the yeast to finish its job and condition. In hindsight, I probably should have added some fresh yeast to the mix to help ensure a proper carbonation, but hindsight is 20/20. In the end, everything turned out just fine.

|TASTING NOTES|

Well, the beer itself looks pretty par the course. It’s hazy, with that supple goldenrod hue and it pours with a nice, fluffy white head. Not particularly great retention or lacing, but decent. If we’re being real, it’s for me hard to wax poetic over every NEIPA when, generally, they kinda all look the same. [Note: I took the picture about a week after bottling. Sadly, a few more days afterwards, the beer started to succumb to the woes of the NEIPA style and oxidized into the muddy, murky brown-ish territory that plagues homebrewers that don’t/can’t keg this style of beer and keep it as free from oxygen as possible on the cold side.]

Right off the bat, though, the nose is dramatically different, however. Certainly, all the hops shine through, a nose of citrus, berry, and a hit of grass and pine, but there’s also a definitive layer of cake-y, vanilla-y goodness coming through. There’s also a solid twang of the malty sweetness as well.

Admittedly, the taste department is where I’m very hot/cold on this beer. The hop flavors are good. My first time trying the batch, it was very green, and I wasn’t into it, but over time, the flavors have mellowed out and it’s a pretty solid blend of the tasty IPA-style hoppy goodness. Lots of flavors like apple, pear, tropical fruit, and some light stonefruit. Even then, the beer really has that funfetti white cake flavor to it, which is only accentuated by the maltiness of the English malt flavors too. Perhaps, a little too much. To me, this is super sweet, even by comparison to barleywines and stouts that I’ve had finish at similar gravities. I think a lot of that is that, even in small doses, vanilla amplifies sweetness. This means that, the me, while I can recognize that the sweetness is in balance with the ABV, good lord is this beer a saccharine, diabetic nightmare. It’s almost sickeningly sweet, hitting almost into the territory of smarties. The alcohol is deceptively well hidden, especially for what it is. The bitterness also lingers a bit, but it helps offset the sweetness, almost kinda like what and American Strong Ale like Double Bastard does.

The mouthfeel, I think, also accentuates the cloying sweetness of the beer. While an unctuous, creamy body is something I typically like in a NEIPA, the beer almost comes off as chewy, forcing the sweetness to linger like a dessert. I mean, this pretty much is a dessert anyways, but aside from the ABV being super high, I don’t think I could physically drink more than 5-8 oz. of this in one sitting. The carbonation is the average level of CO2 for an IPA, which could probably have been bumped up a little to compensate for the heaviness, but it’s not like its flat or undercarbed either.

Is this a success? Well, yeah, I mean, I made a beer that uses funfetti cake and tastes like funfetti cake. However, it’s also not a super successful pairing because of how hamfisted it is about itself. This beer has all the delicacy of a bull in a China shop or Caitlyn Jenner driving an Escalade. It was fun to make (somewhat), but I definitely can’t see myself recommending the process or trying to repeat this one again any time soon. I don’t hate it, but this batch certainly isn’t one of my favorites, by any stretch.