Black IPA Racking

Tonight we racked our Black IPA and did the dry hopping for the secondary fermentation. We had a three gallon batch and decided to rack into three separate one-gallon carboys so that we could try different varieties of hops. Normally I don't bother with a blog post because racking is usually smooth and uneventful. Though not our most epic racking disaster, tonight still had enough twists to warrant the post.

When we took the lid off the primary fermenter, the krausen still hadn't fallen in the beer, so that was a little concerning. Ideally we would wait for the krausen to fall before racking, but with the plastic bucket there's no way to know without opening the lid and risking contamination. I think we're going to get a clear plastic fermenter so that in future brews we can see what's going on during primary fermentation. I don't know why the krausen still hadn't fallen after a week - maybe it was too cold in the room we had so the fermentation was slow. The gravity was down to 1.021. Ideally it would still drop a few points, but it is up to 8% ABV so at least that part is good.

We're using Cascade, Sorachi Ace, and Galaxy for our three hops. Since the three hops have different levels of alpha acid, I adjusted the amount of hops added to each carboy to balance them out. The goal is for each beer to have roughly the same level of hop aroma and flavor from the dry hopping. The alpha acid numbers are used to adjust bitterness levels when using hops during the boil. I'm not actually sure it will translate to the levels of aroma and flavor from the dry hopping, but that's all I could think of.

The original recipe called for 21.8g for each hop addition during the boil, then 21.8g of Cascade for the dry hopping. Based on the different alpha acid levels, 21.8g of Cascade translated to 13.1g of Sorachi Ace or 10.5g of Galaxy hops, which were the amounts we used. The only catch - those numbers were for the whole batch! I should have divided by three, giving 7.3g of Cascade, 4.4g of Sorachi Ace, and 3.5g of Galaxy in their respective carboys.

Not only did we use three times as much hops for the dry hopping as we were supposed to, I also forgot that we were supposed to do the dry hopping a week before bottling, not right at the start of racking to the secondary. I even have it on my calendar to do the dry hopping next Tuesday then bottle the following Tuesday.

I'm not sure what to do next to avoid totally overpowering the beer with the hops, since now we have three times as much hops sitting on the beer for twice as long as it was supposed to. Maybe we can rack the beer off of those hops in a week, or just go ahead and bottle in a week and give it longer in the bottle to continue the conditioning process. Or we can leave the hops in there for the next two weeks and possibly create some seriously face-slapping hoppy beer.

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