|BACKGROUND|

Much akin to my talking shit about how easy it would be to make a gluten-free beer taste good (fun fact, it is, but it’s also fucking expensive), I’ve also talked a lot of shit about probably being able to make a solid session IPA.

Granted, I’ve been doing that for about 3-4 years now. Evil Twin has made Bikini Beer, Trillium has been ripping along with Congress St (pale ale? Pfft. That shit’s an IPA), and even a brewery local to me, South County, has been crushing it with their Day Rider. The game has changed in the past few years. No longer is Founder’s All Day IPA this prime example of a sessionable IPA (note: I always thought that beer was watery as shit).

Initially, I had planned this to be a regular IPA, focusing more on the fact that I wanted to brew with the new LupuLN2 hop powder that has been sweeping the hazy IPA scene like a tornado trying to skullfuck every person who lives in the range from Northern Texas to the border of South Dakota ever since Monkish released Lines.

However, I’m not a popular, cool blogger like Scott Janish, so I had to wait patiently like every other homebrewer to buy my own when they released it last month. After champing at the bit for a few weeks, I did succeed in my goal of procuring said gold dust.

In the end, this IPA is honestly a bit of a kitchen sink beer – I had some small odds and ends of hop and grain leftovers from prior batches that I figured I could stand to use up. Not that it’s a terrible mish-mash-hash idea of an IPA, seeing that the hops used all fit together well (I mean, it’s not like there’s Saaz, Fuggles, and Falconer’s Flight in this), but it’s definitely visibly piecemeal if you look at the recipe.

As far as the name goes: so many breweries have been ripping along on the whole “dank” tanget of naming beers. Dank Williams, Dank Hill, Dank Sinatra. Most of the good joke names for “Franks” have been taken (although, I haven’t honestly seen a Dank Reynolds or Dank Azaria yet). In keeping with the trend of adapting a real person’s name into the beer title, I stumbled onto the fact that, while “green” is popular as a joke, no breweries have explored that naming facet yet. Sure, you’ve got OH’s All Green Everything and Terrapin’s So Fresh, So Green, plus the myriad I can’t even come to fathom, but names… not so much.

At the same point, it was almost too perfect. Not only does the name switch work, but I get to triple down on so many cocaine related entendres with this. Charlie being a nickname for cocaine, “fat lines” of hop powder (ayo Monkish), and just simply the fact that Charlie Sheen is notoriously known for his amazing drug-fueled rants.

Besides, who doesn’t like dead memes from 2011?

Them Digits

Batch Size: 5 gallons

Mash Temp: 155F for 60 min.

Boil Time: 30 min.

Batch Efficiency: 70%

Original Gravity: 1.034 // 8.5 P

Final Gravity: 1.014 // 3.6 P

Estimated ABV: 2.5%

IBUs: 44

SRM: 6.4 EBC // 3.2 SRM

Recipe

Malts

3# Fawcett Pearl| 40%

2# White Wheat | 27%

2# Flaked Oats | 27%

.5# CaraPils | 6%

Hops

2 oz. Galaxy @ 5 min.

1 oz. Hallertau Blanc @ 5 min.

2 oz. El Dorado @ 1 min.

1 oz. Citra LupuLN2 @ 1 min.

1 oz. Simcoe LupuLN2 @ hopsteep (170F for 15 min)

1.5 oz. Cashmere @ dryhop (3-day contact)

1 oz. Mosaic LupuLN2 @ dryhop (3-day contact)

Yeast

Wyeast 1317 (London III) – Fermented at 74/75F

Spices and Stuff

2 tsp CaCl

3 mg Lactic acid (88%) added in mash water

|BREW LOG|

Actually the second half of a double brewday, but it was such a simple beer that it was easy to prep for. Almost all the allotted ingredients for the batch were already in their proper weights. The only thing I had to weigh out was the 2# of white wheat because I had 3# left in my storage box.This is definitely the smallest grist I’ve ever worked with, for sure. The mash volume was about 3 gallons. It was almost laughable how much it filled the mash tun (cooler). Ideally, I wanted to hit 156F to get some more alpha Amylase reactions going to keep a decent body and some non-fermentable sugars to hang around, came in just shy, but I can handle that. The real challenge was the fact that the pH was actually a little crazy. I had assumed that, being all light hops, that I needed to compensate with a little more acid to nudge the pH down. Oh, I nudged it down, alright. I had come in a little high on doing a darker beer a few hours earlier, so I upped my acid addition when I added the Calcium Chloride to my mash water. I actually don’t have a picture, because I was debating being honest or fudging the numbers a bit, but… it was 4.9 pH in that mash. Well, when you’re about a gallon or two shorter than a typical mash… yeah, you don’t really need to add as much acid. Lesson learned. Also, more signs pointing that I really need to get a water profile done so I can use Bru’n Water like an adult.

Regardless, mash went okay aside from that little hiccup. 60 minutes later I collected about one and a half gallons of first runnings and sparged with about 4 gallons to hit roughly 5.5 gallons. Slightly lower than usual, but I was also only going to boil for 30 minutes – I wasn’t worried about needing a higher boil volume or needing a FWH or 60 minute hop addition to drive for bittering.

While I still end up battling myself over whether to actually do high IBU beers, I’ve stepped away from them of late.

I think I got a little jaded after accidentally making a 100+ IBU IPA that was palate-crushingly bitter. This has left me with about four 5 mL pens of Hop Jizz that I’ll eventually need to use in my freezer.

It used to be that I’d bang out solid 120 IBU DIPAs and no eyes were batted. I mean, hell, my base IPA recipe is pretty much a Heady Topper clone. I guess my tastes end up reflecting the shift in the market as well.

A relatively modest hop schedule. This is the Simcoe LupuLN2 “Powder”… little disappointed on this.

Being that this is the case, the boil was easy, even easier since it was 30 minutes. There were three hop additions, and none of them came before 5 minutes. Then it was the typical hop burst, flameout additions, and a 15 minutes hop steep at 170-175F.

Truly, a better experiment/weird beer would be to have used just straight hop powder for this beer, but a) that shit is literally twice the price of regular hops and b) I have also had enough “powder only” beers and read enough info to see know that you actually benefit from using them in tandem with pellet/whole leaf hops.

Regardless, I digress, and digression is bad.

Once the hops started going in, the beer immediately changed into what I had been shooting for. The boil started kicking up all sorts of aromas of tropical fruit and citrus and after taking the lid off of the kettle post-steep, all I could really smell was dank juice.

I removed all the hops at this point and continued to cold crash down to 68F.

Not the highest efficiency, but the gravity ended up at 1.034, easily within the realm of what I wanted for this beer. I mean, if you’re gonna call it a “hyper session”, it better be goddamn low ABV. I’m shooting for at most 3.5%, and with a higher mash temp, hopefully there will be a decent lack of fermentables to hold it over in that threshold.

From there, the typical tango of rack over into the carboy and pitch ensued. Of course, used London III because this is NEIPA and Conan is old hat and, well, I can get the London III really easily. I guess it’s just convention at this point.

The beer was seemingly the right appearence (I mean, it looks like muddy rainwater puddles at a construction site) and, at an estimate, there’s probably closer to 4.5 gallons of beer in a 7 gallon Fermonster. With that amount of headspace, I was pretty comfortable with actually using an airlock, something I haven’t done for a very long time. Also helped that I didn’t have a spare blowoff tube because the second one had been completely gnarled by a previous beer and would have been more of a hassle to clean than the tube was actually worth.

Even then, looking at this from a realistic viewpoint: This shouldn’t be a crazy fermentation. We’re talking maybe 3 days, tops. It’s only gotta go down like 20 points. Some yeast can do that in a day or two (looking at you 3711). I’m imagining that both the beers should be done in under a week, which I’m okay with.

After about 36 hours, there was a slight krausen, but I’m willing to attribute the smaller-than-usual size to the fact that I used a little extra FermCap and that there really shouldn’t be an absolutely bat-shit amount of fermentation.

As predicted, the fermentation for the beer was pretty fast. There was about a 1/2″ krausen for 2-3 days, and by day 4, it had pretty much dropped. I think the FermCap OD also helped prevent any sort of massive krausen. From there, it resided for for 4 days, just in case there was any residual fermentation, and it was dryhopped with 1.5 oz. Cashmere and 1 oz. of Mosaic LupuLN2 powder. Upon Scott Janish’s advice, we used a sanitized whisk to gently, very gently, stir in the “powder” (again, maybe 50% pellets) so that they weren’t just chilling on top of the beer. Whisk is a strong word here. Perhaps “massaged” would be more accurate. As I wasn’t going to be DDHing the beer, the hops were just thrown in loose for optimum extraction.

Bottling day came and went with relative ease. I used a bit over 1/2 cup, roughly 4 oz., of table sugar dissolved in water as a simple syrup to prime, shooting for 2.4 vol. of C02 for carbonation. But damn, that empty fermenter smelled dank. I think Cashmere is slowly making its way onto my “favorite hops” list.

Now, there is a slight update on my “harumph” about my LupuLN2 powder being pellet-y. I emailed YCH and they told me that “Cryo Hops® LupuLN2® are sold in pellet form to homebrew retailers… basically the powdered LupuLN2 made into pellet form” so that it doesn’t float. I’m still only salty about this because then why the fuck market it as a powder to homebrewers? Everything I see about it is powder this, powder that. Absolutely nowhere is the word “pellet” even mentioned.

Just let me have my goddamn powder so I can make my cocaine jokes accurate >:c

On the other hand, I was also surprised to take my gravity at bottling and see the beer was a little higher than I had expected. I had initially shot for about 3.5% ABV as my target, which is super session, but maybe not hyper session. Well, at 1.014 (with temp correction), that clocks in at 2.5%, which I think I’m entirely comfortable calling a “hyper session IPA”.

Even tasting this sweet OJ look-a-like at bottling wasn’t unpleasant. Usually I can’t drink green beer. Overall, it had some promise and I’ll be looking forward to trying it carbonated.

Tasting Notes

The first thing I noticed upon pouring the beer was that, somehow, it smelled almost exactly like how I remember Heady Topper smelling like, which is fucked because I don’t think I used any of the hops that John Kimmich has briefly ever alluded to actually using. I’m definitely hitting that “6 varietals” type shit that he’s confirmed though, that sneaky fucker.

That flavor, doe. It’s juicy, with hints of citrus and berry. Surprisingly, there’s a light bitterness that actually lingers at the back of the palate, despite only being 44 IBU. I’m going to chalk that up to the fact that I completely fucked the Relative Bitterness Ratio on this one. Even though it finished at 1.014, it doesn’t seem sweet. Gently, perhaps, but it’s definitely not a malt bomb.

Visually, this looks like that Trillium haze bomb type jawn that I was absolutely aiming for. With the amount of oats and wheat I used compared to the amount of actual malts and not using WhirlFloc, I’d really have had to fuck up to not get the haze right. Only thought would be that it actually errs on the side of missing a little bit of the golden color, being a slightly tan-gold than the lurid yellow-orange that’s typical of the NEIPA world. I don’t usually like using Crystal/Cara malts if I don’t have a reason for them, but just a little more might have benefited the color, perhaps. The level of haze, without double dryhopping or dryhopping during active fermentation is actually impressive. I have a sneaky feeling that this is also partly due to the LupuLN2 powder, especially that I think Scott Janish also mentioned getting some similar results to that extent as well. The lacing is pretty legit, though. Despite the addition of CaraPils, though, the head retention isn’t exactly mindblowing, which is somewhat disappointing, as I know for a fact that I’ve been getting this puppy into some “beer glass clean” glasses at work and at home. You win some, you lose some, I suppose.

Mouthfeel is definitely all over the place on this one, though. With the carbonation, it feels pretty full-bodied while it’s in your mouth, but it finishes just a little thin, which seems like it should be expected while also being a bit surprising knowing that the grist is over 60% shit that should fly in the face of that conclusion. It’s not bad, I mean, I’d actually be a little put off if it was thick and chewy, but it just caught me off my guard. For being this low an ABV, though, and just the concept of what it is, I’ll accept that it’s a slightly thin pale ale consistency. Good enough for me.

Despite the LupuLN2 not being the magic matcha-colored hop yayo I wanted, this beer turned out great. At this point, it’s still a bit too green for my taste. I think it needs a bit more time for all the flavors to mellow out and meld together, but the few people that I have shared bottles with so far have been pretty satisfied with it. Good luck getting turnt up on it, though.