Last week we created two different chili extracts - one with the seeds and ribs of the pepper intact and one with them removed. The one with the seeds in particular smells amazing now. So much smoke and heat. The easy part of the day was racking the beer to three different carboys, but then we had to figure out how much chili extract to put in each.
We took a cup and a half of the beer and put it into three different 4oz cups, then used a pipette to gradually put more and more drops of extract in to get the taste we were going for. The seedless chili extract imparted a lot of pepper flavor into the beer without a ton of heat. We decided something in the range of 6 or 7 drops was good in 4oz of beer. The hotter chili extract gave a lot more heat to the beer, so we thought around 5 drops was good in 4oz. For the third batch, we decided to do both, with about 6 drops of the seedless extract and 9 or so of the hot extract. We're hoping it gives a nice combination of heat and pepper flavor. When converted up to full batch scale, we went with 2tsp of seedless in the one gallon, 2tsp of hot extract in the other, then 2tsp of seedless and 1Tbsp of hot in the third gallon.
As far as the fermentation progress, this beer had a huge krausen, and some yeast sludge was still on the top of the beer even at the time of racking. The refractometer confirmed that the fermentation went well. We got a measurement of 9.0 brix equating to 1.013 specific gravity. Given the original gravity of 1.072, that gives us a 7.8% ABV beer.
We're planning to bottle this weekend, so then in maybe a month we should be tasting our first Imperial Chili IPA!
