http://www.thebrewingnetwork.com/post1668/
In this episode of Can You Brew It, Jamil and Tasty attempt to clone Citra Double IPA from Kern River Brewing Company in Kernville, CA. This wonderful craft beer took gold at the Great American Beer Festival in 2011 and has racked up many other awards as one of the best double IPA’s on earth. Tune in and find out if Tasty was able to homebrew this hop monster of a beer.
Needs a 2L Starter using 200g of DME
https://shop.theelectricbrewery.com/pages/kern-river-citra-double-ipa
add 500mg potassium metabisulphite to 20 gallons water to remove chlorine / chloramine (if required).
Water treated with brewing salts to our Hoppy flavour profile: Ca=110, Mg=18, Na=16, Cl=50, SO4=275 (Basically Randy Mosher's ideal Pale Ale numbers with slightly less Sulphate). For complete details on how to adjust your water, refer to our step by step Water Adjustment guide.
1.25 qt/lb mash thickness.
Single infusion mash at 148F for 120 mins.
Raise to 168F mashout temperature and hold for 10 mins.
~90 min fly sparge with ~5.6-5.8 pH water (measured at mash temperature). Collect 13.9 gallons.
Milwaukee MW102 pH meter
MORE INFOBoil for 60 minutes, adding Whirlfloc and hops per schedule.
After boil steep / whirlpool for 20 minutes with the lid on. (No need to stir, steeping is fine. Hop oil extraction is a function of contact time and temperature, not motion).
With the lid still on, cool the wort quickly to 67F (we use a one-pass convoluted counterflow chiller to quickly lock in hop flavour and aroma) and transfer to fermenter.
Aerate well. Pure oxygen from a tank may be used at a rate of 1 litre per minute for 120 seconds per 5 gallons.
Pitch yeast and ferment at 67F (wort temperature). We use modified stainless fermenting buckets in wine fridges.
Due to the high hopping rates and quadruple dry hopping the beer is very susceptible to oxidation. You have to be very careful to minimize all exposure to oxygen in order to preserve the hop flavours and aromas. Even hops themselves can have oxygen caught in their anatomy. Some hints:
If a vessel needs to be opened, purge the headspace with CO2 before closing.
Before adding hops to beer, place them in a tall container and flush with CO2.
Flush target vessels with CO2 before transferring beer. If hops are to be added at the same time (i.e. dry hop #2), add them to the vessel first.
Don't be stingy with CO2! CO2 is cheap. To flush vessels, growlers, kegs we have a separate bare gas line off one of our manifolds with its own shutoff.
Add dry hops #1 once fermentation is nearing completion (i.e. 5 points from terminal gravity) and raise the temperature to 70-72F. We simply turn off the fermenting fridges and allow the beer to naturally rise to room temperature. Steep dry hops #1 for 3 days while fermentation finishes. Assume fermentation is done if the gravity does not change over ~3 days.
Add dry hops #2 to brite tank (we use 5 gallon glass carboys), purge with CO2 to avoid oxygen pickup, then carefully rack in the beer on top of the hops. Allow to steep for 3 days at 70-72F room temperature, gently swirling a few times a day. We do not recommend using hop sacks or other containers as you'll get the best flavour extraction from the hops if you let them roam free. For beers such as this that require multiple dry hop additions, some will dry hop in kegs using stainless steel dry hoppers, tying a piece of unflavoured / unwaxed dental floss to the lid to make it easy to remove (the floss is thin and doesn't impede the seal between the keg and keg lid). We don't recommend this approach as we find that the hops tend to clump together which in turn reduces oil extraction, requiring far too many hops to be used (and more beer lost to absorption).
After 3 days in the brite tank add dry hops #3. Leave previous hops in. Swirl gently a few times a day.
After 6 days in the brite tank add dry hops #4. Leave previous hops in. Swirl gently a few times a day.
After 9 days in the brite tank package as you would normally. We rack to kegs that have first been purged with CO2, and then carbonate on the low side (around 2 volumes of CO2) to minimize carbonic bite and let the hop and malt flavours shine through. We chill the kegs to near freezing while carbonating at the same time in a 6-keg conditioning fridge. After ~1-2 weeks at serving pressure the kegs will be carbonated and ready to serve. Like all hop forward beers this Double IPA is best consumed fresh so feel free to raise the CO2 pressure temporarily to 30-40 PSI to carbonate fast over a 24 period, and then turn back down to serving pressure. Some hop bits will have invariably made their way into the keg during transfer so we use a Hop Stopper Keg Edition filter to ensure that hops do not clog the dip tube and/or end up in the glass. Force carbonating at high pressure and using a Hop Stopper filter allows us to serve this beer 24 hours after kegging. There's no need to wait a few days for any hop bits that made their way into the keg to first settle out.
We do not recommend using finings such as unflavoured gelatin as it may "round off" hop flavours / aromas.
