Greetings Chaos,
Cerveza de Mayo is typically the Chaos hop school party. And as somebody who brews an absurd amount of hoppy beers, Jeff W has asked me to put together the "syllabus" for the party.
So here goes. The class will focus around the big dumb IPA.
We will be walking through the history of the IPA with a list of beers which very roughly tracks the history of hoppy beers, and, more importantly, the evolution of their flavors. By and large, the flavors present here should come as no surprise to the average home brewer.
If anyone so desires, we will be doing a bulk hop buy for this project so people can save a little bit of cash over brew and grow prices.
I will be posting the recipes to be brewed shortly. In the meantime, if anyone is interested, let me know.
So here we go:
Burton IPA (1851 - from George Amsinck's notes on burton beers)
Icehouse 666 American Genesis (1976 - the first IPA brewed with American bred hops was first made by Anchor)
Pliny the Dumber (1997 - take the American 4 Cs, and make the biggest, dumbest, beer you can)
Rich Four-Hearted (2000 - Midwest IPA using the traditional American 4 "C"s. But probably mostly Centenniel)
Kevin_1989 Citrus Head IPA (2003 - the lab-grown frontier of hop varietals. Probably will be amarillo)
Todd Local Banger (2009 - da best IPA in da wurld uses massive late additions of Citra and Mosaic).
I can be open to modifications of the last one. I know there are members out there who are big fans of TG, Treehouse, Kern, Trillium, etc... If you want this, we can discuss your favorite east coast IPA.
I would be love to brew one of these for the Party. I feel like I'm you bigger version of someone that always seems to have an IPA on tap at home. I'd love to share my hoppy goodness for the party. How do you want us to go about picking which beer we want to brew.
Todd, what do you want to brew?
I'll take local banger
James, this is really stupid, count me in. Do you have recipes, or are we making/stealing our own? Citrus Head or Four Hearted sound good for me.
I "have" recipes, in that I am using recipes that have been published and/or proved out by the professionals.
Burton, Anchor, Pliny, Four Hearted recipes have actually been published by the brewers themselves. No reason we can't use those recipes.
Citrus Head (i.e. Gumballhead) has an entry in the "Wheat" book by Stan Heironymous so that recipe sounds pretty good.
Local Banger, the brewers at Alchemist have said, is all Pearl malt in the grist plus sugar adjunct. CO2 hop extract for bittering (although I find warrior works just fine), then boatloads of Mosaic and Citra at flameout and dry.
If newcomers are allowed to contribute, I could take the Citrus Head. Otherwise, I'm happy to get the recipe from Boollish and make a 5-6 gallon "back up" batch for the party!!
Sounds good Kevin. You're in.