Double Audacity

(Click mages to make 'em BIG)

Hello there! I know it's been since May, but life is a funny thing. Long story short, the lovely Amy and I moved in together and there's no way to brew it up at the new place. So, I hung up the kettles and have been in semi-retirement drinking Pliny in bottles. But, once you're bit with the homebrew bug, you're sick and infected for life. And my good buddy Drew Beechum finally got his Stout Guy Brewery up and running at his new place, it was time to dust off the mash paddle and brew some damn beer! Mother Nature felt the same way and she gave us the single most beautiful day in recent memory. Gotta love late January in North Eastern Los Angeles.

What to brew? Well, the only beer I'm really interested in anymore are DIPAs. Sue me. And then I saw a wonderful typo/malapropism on some forum somewhere, "The Audacity of Hop." This beer quickly became a no brainer. Now, Amy and I had brewed a nice big DIPA just before we moved called Sea of Love, but sadly we never got to drink very much of it. Jimmy saw to that. Anyhow, The Audacity of Hops is based on the earlier recipe with a couple changes. Namely, more hops.

In addition to the 20 pounds of domestic 2-Row, 12 pounds of Marris Otter and 2 pounds of Carapils, we added 0.25 pounds of Black Patent Malt. Just, you know, why not? And then we decided to darken the beer further by tossing in a bottle of that Dark Belgian Syrup stuff. So we'd wind up with a (fairly) dark, highly attenuated beer with no discernable roast character and hopped out both the wazoo and ying yang. 

Oh yeah, we added 1.5 pounds of this yummy raw, organic Malawian, fair trade cane sugar, too. Despite the darkening, we're still following the Vinnie method of adding lightness (i.e. sugar) and body (i.e. lotsa dextrin via the carapils). But which hops?

While we did forget to hop the sparge water, every other point of this beer's creation got hopped. Mash Hops? Hell yeah! We used a varietal from New Zealand called, "Green Bullet." Smelled good, in sort of a resiny, high-alpha hop way (I think the alpha acid was 13.3%).Hey, with a name like "Audacity" what else you going to do?

One addition for each day of the week! From left to right you're looking at 2 ounces of Amarillo Gold as a FWH (First Wort Hop), 3 ounces of Warrior + 1 ounce of Newport for the 90 minute bittering charge, an ounce of Simcoe at 45 minutes, 1 ounce of Amarillo Gold + 1 ounce of Columbus at 30 minutes, 1 ounce of Palisade + 1 ounce of Columbus at 10 minutes and another 2 ounce mix of Palisade and Columbus at flame out. Counting the Green Bullet Mash Hops, that's 15 ounces of hops in 10 gallons of beer with 221.3 IBUs. Ha ha ha! And that's not even considering the 4 additional ounces of hops we'll be using to dry hops these suckers. 

That's right, I said suckers. As in plural, two. The first of the two, The Audacity of Hops, is going to get dry hopped with 2 ounces of Amarillo Gold. The second beer, The Audacity of Aretha Franklin's Hat (seriously), is getting an ounce of Columbus and an ounce of Summit. Personally, I'm equally interested in both.

Thankfully the day went off without a hitch. Hey, we even had John Palmer on hand to remind us to toss pennies into the kettle when it began boiling over. And I trust John Palmer. Drew, John and I all tasted the 1.096 (target was 1.098) wort just after it cooled and prior to entering the fermenter. We all agreed that for a pre-yeast beer this one tasted really good. Perhaps audaciously so.