Post
by psfred » Sat Feb 26, 2011 11:38 am
"American IPA" isn't a style so much as a gross over-indulgence in hops.
Traditional India Pale Ales were stronger and more highly hopped than "normal" pale ales to withstand shipping to India on sailing ships (in barrels, I presume, hence the oak chips). Pale Ales are more highly hopped and stronger than "bitters", which I would class as ordinary 3.2 beer today. My guess is that the alcohol content was about 6% ABV, no more, and about 1/3 more hops, more or less. The minimum that would preserve the beer for the trip, I expect. Cost is always an issue in a business, and the makers of IPA for shipment to India were not hobby brewers.
Modern beers are probably different (and better beer, too).
It's all a matter of taste, and the current "American IPA" taste is for so much hop flavor you could just add some ever-clear to dirty water that has had a couple pounds of hops per gallon boiled in it and some people would swear they are in heaven. Add a couple crushed grapefruit peels and they would die of bliss. I once read a judges report on a beer that had to have been 80 IBU or more complaining it needed more hops, as if 2 oz of 12% alpha acid hops in the boil for a 5 gallon batch and two or three ounces at the end of boil wasn't enough! Must be some sort of disease induced by mis-reading supposed brewing recipes that called for huge amounts of hops in 1500, forgetting that one must translate the measures, or a serious case of eating too many hot peppers and loosing all the taste buds on the tongue (it happens).
My personal feeling is that if you are belching hops the next six hours after drinking a beer, you put too many in. If you can still taste the bitterness an hour later, it was too bitter. One can also mask brewing defects with super hopping, another reason for it's popularity, I suspect.
On the more serious side, the mash temperature has a large influence on the frementability and final gravity, hence residual sweetness, of the beer. Lower temperatures (above 150F) favor the activity of beta amylase, which makes maltose from long chain starches. High temperatures degrade beta amylase quickly and therefor leave more long chain sugars that normal brewing yeasts cannot metabolize, making the end product higher in gravity and sweeter. Wild yeasts can sometimes use those long chain sugars, though -- a leading cause of overcarbonation and funky tastes.
Depending on what you want in your final beer -- malt, hops, and the balance between the two -- you will have to set and maintain the correct temperature in the mash. The grain you use has an effect too -- pale malt acts differently than lager malt, and roasted or crystal malts/caramel malts add other things, including non-fermentable sugars. You must get the temperature over 150F for a least a short time, though -- the starch isn't fully gelatinized until you do, and it will hang around as haze in the beer after boiling if the temperature never hit 150 during the mash. Mash-out at 167 won't help, because the alpha amylase is also dead by then.
One should also not confuse hop FLAVOR with hop BITTERNESS, as I suspect some people do. As Chris pointed out, dry hopping gives lots of flavor with no extra bitterness. If you want significant hop aroma, you can only dry hop, as the aroma will boil off in minutes. Flavor goes a bit slower, but not much, so you won't get any flavor at all from bittering hops (longer than 30 min boil). The practice of adding flavor and aroma hops just before chilling is a good idea -- most of the flavor and aroma will stay around, but they are sanitized by the boiling wort. Or you can remove the condensate drain in your vent stack at the bewery and let all the volatiles drip back into the beer, as happened at Turoni's before they got a professional brewer in. Ruined an otherwise pretty nice batch of Double Diamond Ale -- the flavor of the hops overwhelmed everything else.
Peter
What should I do? 
Good luck!
.......IPA...... 
