|BACKGROUND|

With my last excursion using Wild Pitch’s lactic acid-producing yeast strains going so well, I was excited to see what the future may hold for the second vial I had from them. Granted, it was a different strain, but I was pretty confident that, after seeing how the last one had played with brewing, that this new one was going to go along just as well.

Instead of sequentially pitching this yeast with a traditional brewer’s yeast, I decided that I wanted to make this strain the star of the show. Well, mostly, at least. After decrying the woes of hoppy beers getting oxidized in a previous post, I ended up getting a healthy box of hops and malts as part of a prize from the GrogTag homebrew label contest, which was nice, but then meant I had to start using a bunch of random malts and hops from BSG that I probably wouldn’t have ever bought on my own. Looking at everything that I had received, I ended up deciding that it was pretty much inevitable that I had to brew another IPA. I also decided that I wasn’t going to make a NEIPA, I was going to stick to my guns and do something different: a sour IPA, where I didn’t care if it was hazy or not.

To this end, I looked at the list of ingredients that I had and what would be able to be worked into a recipe. In lieu of my standards of either Pearl or Pilsner malts for my base, I picked the Irish Malting Co.’s Irish Ale Malt, since I had 10# of it. For the hop bill, I decided to roll with mostly Mosaic and Galaxy, seeing that they had also given me about a 1/2# of each. The only other component that I had to work in was 2 oz. of Southern Promise hops. Back when I was making the African Gruit, one of the guys in my homebrew club slid me 2 oz. of the South African hops from the pound he had bought and I was enough on the fence about using hops while brewing or dryhopping the beer that I never ended up putting them into the batch. I figured that, if anything, the flavors of red berry and citrus would be perfectly in line with the other two IPA powerhouses.

Of course, that core recipe, in and of itself, wasn’t strange enough. At work, we had just gotten in another batch of Une Annee’s Le Seul XIX, which is the iteration they do with aronia berries. Also known as chokeberries, aronia berries are kinda like black currants crossed with cranberries on steroids. They play really well in that base sour ale, as well as turning the beer a deep fuchsia/magenta in color. Not knowing any sort of way to procure these, I turned to the magic of the internet.

While not exactly a cheap ingredient, I managed to come across SuperBerries, which is pretty much just a website that’s like “You like aronia berries? Have some aronia berries!”, with everything from the whole berries to gummies to energy shots to whatever else you can make with aronia berries. Since they had free shipping after like $45, and that shipping 2# was like $20, I figured that was a sign that I needed 4# of berries instead of the 2# I was initially planning on. Combining that with the fact that I got a 15% off coupon for signing up with their mailing list, I ended up getting a bunch of their energy shot/gummy chews combo packs for pretty much free. Not that I’m complaining, those were pretty tasty. They came in about a day or two, frozen and sealed in a bag in a styrofoam cooler. I just popped them into the freezer until the time was right. (Note: clarifying this now – I’m not a shill. Nobody has sponsored a blog post on here. Yet.)

Naturally, my final step came to figure out the whole identity of the beer. One of my friends ended up posting a caricature of Lil Wayne on Facebook and that’s when inspiration struck. Similar to the last “purple” beer I brewed, of course there needed to be another lean referring beer. Except this time, it was one of the sizzurp lords himself as inspiration. Settling on a reference to the popular song “Me & My Drank”, I called the brew “Double Cup” (Won’t somebody please, please, double cup me).

In hindsight, my only regret is that I somehow didn’t think to put Jolly Ranchers into this beer for a completely over-the-top lean reference. Truly a missed opportunity for the ages.

Them Digits

Batch Size: 6 gallons

Mash Temp: 150 F for 60 min.

Boil Time: 60 min.

Batch Efficiency: 75%

Original Gravity: 1.065 // 15.9 P

Final Gravity: 1.014 // 3.57 P

Estimated ABV: 6.7%

IBUs: 46 IBU

Color: 5.2 SRM // 10.3 EBC (But magenta/maroon, really)

Recipe

Malts

10# Irish Ale Malt | 72%

2# Red Wheat | 15%

1# Flaked Oats | 7%

.75# Turbinado Sugar | 6%

Hops

1 oz. Chinook (9.1% AA) @ 60 | 42 IBU

1 oz. Mosaic (11.9% AA) @ 1 | 2 IBU

1 oz. Galaxy (16.8% AA) @ 1 | 2 IBU

2 oz. Mosaic (11.9% AA) @ Post-Boil Steep, 170F for 10 min. | 0 IBU

2 oz. Galaxy (16.8% AA) @ Post-boil Steep, 170F for 10 min. | 0 IBU

2 oz. Mosaic (11.9% AA) @ Dryhop, 3 days | 0 IBU

2 oz. Galaxy (16.8% AA) @ Dryhop, 3 days| 0 IBU

2 oz. Southern Promise (7.2% AA) @ Dryhop, 3 days | 0 IBU

Yeast

1x vial of Wild Pitch HY156 (Schizsoccharomyces japonicus), 1L starter

Spices and Stuff

4# Aronia berries

Water Shit

2 mL 88% Lactic Acid

1 tsp CaCl

|BREW LOG|

The brew day started off with heating up about 4 gallons of water for the mash up to a strike temp of 164F. After milling the grains and adding in some light water adjustments, I mashed in the grist, landing pretty solidly at the target temp. After a 60 min. mash, I collected about 2.5 gallons of first runnings and batch sparged with 5.5 gal. of 165F water, allowing the grain bed to reform.

After 10-15 minutes, I collected the second runnings from the mash tun into the kettle, netting somewhere in the realm of 7.5 gallons.

Checking the gravity of the pre-boil wort, it came in at about 1.054, which was in line with my calculations. While the mash had been going, I also took the 4 pounds of aroniaberries and had processed them on the stove to make a light compote, just boiling them in a little bit of water and sugar (to help accent the flavor and offset some astringency) and mashing them to get maximum color and flavor extraction.

From there, it followed a more typical boil cycle for an IPA, since rather than being kettle-soured, which is popular for the style, I was going to rely on a lactic acid-producing yeast strain than bacteria. As far as I was aware, since Matt over at Wild Pitch hadn’t mentioned anything, the yeast shouldn’t have any issues with hops, unlike bacteria like Lacto.

Since I’m still a fan of having a little bit of bitterness in my beers, I opted to do a light bittering addition at the beginning of the boil, but still reserved the majority of the hops for hop bursting towards the end. After the hefty 1 minute/flame out addition, I used my immersion chiller to drop the temp of the wort down to 180F and added in the last copious amount of hops for a 15 minutes hop steep, holding the temp in the 170-180F range throughout that time.

After the timer went off, I finished chilling the wort down to the requisite 68F before setting up to rack over into the fermenter. In typical fashion, at this point, I had already gotten the berries inside the sanitized carboy, racking the wort over top of it. The berries themselves looked like a pool of purple craziness and almost any sort of golden color from the wort was immediately just sucked into a void of purple and pink. Using a .5 micron airstone, I aerated the beer for 60 seconds before pitching in the 1L starter of the yeast and connecting the bung to a blowoff tube.

Using a hydrometer to check, the gravity of the beer came in at 1.060 (1.058, adj.), which was slightly low for what my target OG was. On the other hand, I had also gotten a yield of 6 gallons, rather than 5.5, so the numbers were skewed because of the extra half gallon. And so the beer waited for two weeks.

When the time for bottling came closer, and unsure entirely what sort of attenuation I was going to get out of the yeast, I did a gravity check on the beer and it came out to 1.014 (1.016, adj.), which was slightly higher than I wanted, since, to me, a solid IPA should at least be around the 6.5-7% abv territory. To resolve that, I had my dad make a simple syrup with 3/4# of turbinado sugar and add it to the beer, hoping that in the best case scenario, kickstarting the fermentation would eke the beer a little lower and worst case, I just added a few points with sugar.

3 days before bottling day, the beer got dryhopped with another 6 oz. hop blend, in a painter’s bag with some sanitized marbles to weigh it down.

Looking at the beer in the fermenter at bottling, it almost looked like a fluorescent pink NEIPA, which was kinda the goal, in a way. Removing the hop sack, it just smelled like all sorts of jammy funky goodness inside the carboy. Taking a gravity reading, the “worst case” was what seemed to happen, as the gravity was simply back down to 1.014. At least the sugar had fermented out. The racking over was mildly frustrating, due to the fact that the aroniaberries were more than content to float around the surface and clog the autosiphon multiple times. Getting a net yield of about 5.25 gallons, I used 4.6 oz. (2/3 cup) sugar to make a simple syrup solution for priming, aiming at about 2.6 vol/CO2. After cooling the syrup down, I stirred it in gently with a sanitized spoon to ensure dilution. 50 bottles later, everything was sured up and all that was lest was for the bottles to condition.

|TASTING NOTES|

Out of the bottle, the beer pours a gorgeous maroon/magenta color, throwing up a finger or two’s worth of slightly pink head that fades quickly with little to no lacing down the glass. Holding the beer up to the light, it’s brilliantly clear with a solid puck of proteins and yeast at the bottom of the bottle. If you slosh that up into the mix, it’s a light purple in color. I will say, the dregs don’t exactly make anything better, though, unless you need your turbid haze juice tendies massaged. But, seriously, this beer is crystal clear, and that’s not an exaggeration. Crazy that was completely without any sort of clarifying agent.

On the nose, it’s berry, hops, and a hint of funk, almost as if there was just a touch of Brett in the mix. Maybe a light hint of the lactic tartness, but overwhelmingly those three aromas. Little to no malt character.

The taste is where things gets crazy. Mostly, it’s tart and berry, but at the middle of the palate, you get the juicy hop flavors with a hint of fruit candy, and then at the back is this super funky, almost barnyard, type funk. Very light sweetness, despite the slightly higher finishing gravity. The closest comparison that I can make is that it’s similar to the fruited sour IPAs that Other Half has been putting out lately (like Slice The Pies & X Crumble), which I can only see as a good thing, just minus all the spices and vanilla.

Since I primed the batch a little high, it has this super spritzy quality, which I think helps to really get the hops and the fruit flavors to shine. It’s higher carb also helps lift the mouthfeel, keeping it supple, but not overly thick or heavy. Very much in line with a West Coast-style IPA.

This beer turned out really cool. I might’ve hoped for a little more flavor from the yeast, especially compared to the last experiment, but it was still a great end result. For bucking the usual kettle sour IPA trend, I’m all on board with this method. Looking forward to using it in the future too!