Hopefully this will be a good New England style hazy double IPA. If not, we just suck at making hoppy things and should probably give up forever and focus on devastatingly strong wheatwines, barrel-aged sours and smoked quads. Not really a bad fate, I guess, but I'd really like to make just one good strong IPA with some amount of bottle-to-bottle consistency. Christ, it's depressing how little luck we've had with pale hoppy style stuff. So here we go again.
Zythos/Mosaic in the boil, Galaxy in the whirlpool, then double dry-hopped with Summer/Nelson. Hoping (against hope) for intense tropical fruit, bright berry and juicy citrus aromas and flavors with a soft mouthfeel brought on by flaked barley and oats. Just as a note we fermented this with Imperial Yeast's A38 Juice strain, not A18 Joystick as listed here, but Juice isn't added yet, so yea.
5/27/17: Got better efficiency than expected by about 7 points... awesome! Ended up being able to collect a half-gallon extra with that BHE; perfect for our newly-purchased 6 gallon fermenter! Everything went off without a hitch, to be honest. We got a bit stuck halfway through our mash re-circulation, but it was corrected quickly and probably had to do with the flaked oats + barley. Looking forward to dry-hopping this one with Summer and Nelson Sauvin!
6/4/17: Pat added an ounce each of Nelson and Summer last Tuesday night, and we took the sample last night. Hit terminal perfectly, and the sample tasted pretty great and really unique. We actually made a bitter and flavorful IPA if the sample was any indication, so that's good. Added another ounce of each of those hops. Probably won't bottle it for a couple weeks, but it isn't getting racked to secondary (we're bottling it most likely on 6/17 with a portion of its own yeast).