Got the standard Scottish 60- (shilling) Ale kit going today from Northern Brewer. It was about 10 degrees outside this morning, so the brewing happened in the garage instead of on the patio. It was actually quite nice in the garage with the burner and kettle nestled in between my legs! My leg did get too close for a bit, resulting in some scorched denim. Ended up about 30 degrees in the garage.
I tried something I'm calling 'shock hopping' although it's a bit of a misnomer, today. The recipe called for 1/2 oz of Northern Brewer Hops, 8.8% alpha for 60 minutes. This would impart about 20 IBUs in the beer.
I really like hops, so I decided to experiment with a hop addition. So I used some Summit 16.8% alpha hops - 1/8 oz @ 45-55 min in the boil, then removed the first Summit hop and Northern Brewer bittering hop. Then put another 1/8 oz in @ 55-60 min.
Using the Hop Utilization formula to convert amount of hops into IBUs, I turned the beer from about 20 IBUs into around 23 IBUs. About a 15% increase in overall bitterness measured by IBUs. It will be interesting to see how much the increase show up in the bouquet vs. overall bitterness. The starting gravity is only 1.031, so the Summit hops should really show up in the final product.
Also strained the wort going into the fermenter with some grain bags, which captured a ton of sediment. Don't know why we didn't try this before. Without draining sediment I lost about 3/4 gal of beer with the breakfast stout.
