Brew #3: Rocket Appliance IPA

The Story

This brew turned into a bit of a science project. Even though this was our third go at all-grain brewing, it’s technically our first independent brew. The first was done at Brew School (and therefore effectively done for us); the second was what came in our kit from the Home Brew Depot, so it was brewing by numbers really.

For this one, we went-a-foraging for ingredients, but forgot one massively important bit of information; the recipe. So, I did a quick search online and we settled on trying to recreate Brewdog’s Punk IPA (pre 2010 version).

The recipe was for a 5 gallon batch, and actually some of the ingredients turned out to be incorrect when we got back and compared with Brewdog’s own catalogue. So, out came the calculator and the notepad, and then commenced about an hour of conversions and maths and shit that made almost my head explode. Once I was fairly confident we had the ratios right, I wrote out the recipe and we cracked open some Punk IPA to get us in the mood to brew.

Unfortunately, during the brew we ran out of beer and ended up drinking a bottle of prosecco left over from Christmas, so things got a little fucky. Didn’t affect the brew though; and we stumbled on like a pair of drunken monkeys in lab coats.

So an hour of what felt like hardcore maths, plus lots of liquor drink, inspired the name for this brew. We couldn’t resist getting a Rickyism in there.

The Recipe

Adapted for a one-gallon (UK) micro-batch

Mash – 75 mins

• 2.5L Water @ 65 Degrees C
• 1.1Kg Maris Otter Pale Malt

Sparge

• 4L Water @ 78 Degrees C

Boil – 60 mins

Hops:

• 3.5g Ahtanum (at boil)
• 3g Chinook (at boil)
• 3.5g Hallertauer* (after 45 mins)
• 4g Chinook (after 45 mins)
• 3.5g Hallertauer* (at flame out)
• 3.5g Motueka* (at flame out)
• 3.5g Ahtanum (at flame out)
• 5g Chinook (at flame out)

*Whole Leaf Hops

Yeast – 4g SafAle™ S–04

After 14 days fermentation at 21-25 Degrees C, 23g golden caster sugar added at bottling. Bottle condition for 2 weeks.

The Result

Because we pretty much made this recipe up from scratch, and because we were so eager to taste the results of our experiment, we actually tucked into a bottle of this each only one week into bottle conditioning.

Considering the beer wasn’t fully carbonated or refrigerated, I have to say the results were really quite delicious.

This beer is so fruity and tropical, it’s like drinking Carmen Miranda’s hat. The colour is a warm amber gold, slightly cloudy, and looks not dissimilar from a wheat beer in the glass. The similarities end there.

The intense mango, pineapple and passionfruit flavours hint at Punk IPA, but this bastard son definitely has tropical roots, and not so much of the bitter punch in the mouth you get from the original Punk IPA. Nope, this beer is decidedly gentler on the palate.

This would be lovely on a hot, summers day, served with some jerk chicken fresh from the BBQ.

Would we make it again?

Absofuckinglutely… If we can ever properly recreate it.