Today I brewed an IPA using a whopping 10 ounces of palisade, simcoe, amarillo, and homegrown glacier hops. This beer also used 15.5 lbs of grain, including 2 row base malt, Victory, Vienna, and crystal malt. For the whole recipe, see the bottom of the post.

I have brewed many beers in my day, and most of them have been all grain, but this brew session was a bit different. I decided to to try out the brew in a bag method. This is where you use all your water, do not sparge, and all your grains are contained within a bag. Then instead of sparging, you just remove the grains and bag from the kettle and continue on with the rest of your brewing process. One thing I discovered is that a 5 gallon paint strainer bag is not big enough for a keggle. For next time I will have to use a custom made bag.

I had a very difficult time finding an accurate temperature. I was getting reading varying from 148 in the center of the mash, to 160 in the outer portions. I attribute this to having a bag too small for the process. The good news is I did get conversion, the wort was sweet. I realized that my hydrometer broke during the last brew session, so I gave a sample to my friend and he is supposed to email me the OG. I’ll see what my OG was sometime tonight (it turned out to be 1.059). Other than that, the process was very slick and I will be trying it again with a bigger custom made bag.

The second full bag method I employed was using a hop sack. Since I was using 10oz of hops, I wanted to be able to pull them out o fthe kettle making it easier to transfer with less hops to strain out.

Above are the hops, below is the way I hung the strainer as to not have it resting on the bottom. The bag was weighed down with two stainless steel nuts.

Here are the grains pulled from the kettle, my brewing friend Brian is holding the bag.

As you can see the bag is a bit small. Below is the hops pulled, and this is also a 5 gallon bag. It does appear I got a lot of hop character even through the bag because the bedroom where my bucket is fermenting in, smells very thick of hops. I like it, but my wife is not overly thrilled.

Any good brewing session is not complete without some good beers.

So, when all is said and done I don’t think my first brew in a bag session was a success. I don’t think the bag’s size allowed for a true representation of the method. So my main reason for posting this blog entry was to prove that even when many many batches under your belt, picking up a new technique can lead to mistakes. But as long as you learn from them and either adjust the new technique to fit your system. or drop it all together and stay with what works, at least you are trying to improve or simplify the process, which is progress. Before I end up tweaking the recipe, I will first get this process down. I really like the way this recipe looks, and contains some of my favorite IPA components: Simcoe and Amarillo Hops with Victory and Vienna Malts.

D.O.A. IPA

11.00 lb      Brewers Malt 2-Row (Briess) (1.8 SRM)
2.00 lb       Victory Malt (biscuit) (Briess) (28.0 SRM)
1.50 lb       Vienna Malt (Briess) (3.5 SRM)
1.00 lb       Caramel/Crystal Malt – 40L (40.0 SRM)
0.50 oz       Newport [9.30 %]  (60 min)
0.50 oz       Newport [9.30 %]  (40 min)
1.00 oz       Simcoe [11.90 %]  (25 min)
1.00 oz       Amarillo Gold [8.60 %]  (20 min)
1.00 oz       Palisade [6.30 %]  (20 min)
1.00 oz       Simcoe [11.90 %]  (15 min)
1.00 oz       Palisade [6.30 %]  (15 min)
1.00 oz       Amarillo Gold [8.60 %]  (10 min)
1.00 oz       Palisade [6.30 %]  (5 min)
1.00 oz       Glacier [4.50 %]  (5 min)
1.00 oz       Glacier [4.50 %]  (0 min)     -
1.00 items    Whirlfloc Tablet (Boil 15.0 min)
2 Pkgs        SafAle American Ale (DCL #US-05)

9.6 gallons of water total heated to 160 to hit a mash temp of 154. (I did have a hard time hitting the proper temp with the small bag)

90 minute mash

Heated pot to 180 for mash out, removed and drained grains.

Boil=60 minutes

Ended up with 5.25 gallons total.