It's been over a month since I last brewed my second homebrew. This time I chose a recipe from the American Homebrew Association website, one that was originally printed in the Zymurgy magazine. Here's a link to the recipe. Pliny the Toddler is a clone of sorts, a sessionable clone of Pliny the Elder by Russian River Brewing, CA. My brother loves IPA's and this seemed a logical choice, to involve him in the brewing process, split the resulting batch and brew a nice IPA.
I did deviate from the recipe a bit. If you notice, using the extract substitution (because I only have a 5 gallon brew kettle) the recipe calls for 5.6 lbs of pale liquid malt. The homebrew store only carries 3.3 lbs cans. The original recipe calls for some pale malt and some maris otter, so I bought two 3.3 lbs cans, one of pale malt and one of maris otter (contains at least 60% maris otter). When I brewed I just added it all. 5.6 lbs became 6.6 lbs. Also, to try and balance this, I added 1 oz. of each hop variety instead of .75 oz.
The result: A rounded malt balanced IPA, slightly grainy mouthfeel, with an excellent aroma and late bitterness. The hop aroma of mango, grass, floral, citrus, pine and spice dissipates somewhat quickly but it is beautiful. In retrospect, the Warrior hop addition at Warrior hops of 15.7 alpha acids (Centennial 9.0 a.a. and Columbus 15.2 a.a. should have made up for something though!) could have been more. I also omitted the gypsum, which would probably accentuate the hop even more and dry the beer out a bit. I also do not know what ABV it ended up as, because according to my hydrometer reading (which I'm thinking is not accurate) it started at an original gravity of 1.037 to 1.038 instead of 1.048 like it should--and I even added more malt! Somehow I did not manage to get an accurate reading or my efficiency was very low. Final gravity before bottling was 1.010 to 1.008 (if accurate).
If you're using the Untappd app, look for my version of Pliny the Toddler under the homebrew name of Shew Brew.
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