This is another beer brewed as part of a Manchester Homebrew Group challenge – the Single Hop Challenge.
After a bit of discussion and some unsuccessful attempts at sourcing experimental hops, the group decided on using Styrian Wolf, a new hop, as the single hop. The rules are pretty simple: you can brew anything you want as long it uses only Styrian Wolf for the hops. i.e. any style, grain bill, adjuncts, yeast and process you want.
Developed by the Slovenian Institute for Hop Research and Brewing, Styrian Wolf is one of the latest Styrian hops on the market. When brewed, expect intense fruity and floral notes. These include flavors of sweet tropical fruits and complex aromas of mango, elderflower and even a hint of violet. — hoplist.com
So what to brew? When asked Pen stated that she wanted a ‘Dark beer’. That rules out quite a lot and it doesn’t make sense to brew something that uses hops just for bittering (i.e. a porter or a stout) or something where other flavours overwhelm the hops (strong Belgian).
Mike had the idea of brewing an Black IPA which should make good use of the hop flavours and aromas, require significant bittering (Styrian Wolf is about 13-14% AA) and definitely meet the ‘Dark beer’ criteria. As an added bonus we could also use some of our more interesting malts. And we can make it a little more special by adding some of the Beekeepers’ Honey we recently obtained. It’ll help up the strength and maybe add a nice note of something else to the end result. Who knows, we’re making this stuff up?
The final design, for 19L @AW consists of Maris Otter, 5-7% each of rye malt, chocolate malt and roast barley, 10% each of honey and Munich malt. 64g bittering Wolf for about an hour and 7-8g/L of dry hops a few days into the ferment. Maybe some more hops in the keg but we’re not at that point yet. Fermented 20L with Nottingham Ale yeast at 18C.
As an aside we drained an extra 4.5L of wort out of the mash by the end of the brew day. Low gravity but still as black as night. Mike plans to boil it down into a malt extract for us in baking and other non-alcoholic projects.
Back to the matter at hand. The brewday, Sunday 7th, went (almost) perfectly. Everything measured out and cleaned the day before. Water sat in the kettle overnight to de-gas. Heating started at about 8am (before we got up!), mashing about 9.30am, sparging before lunch, boiling during lunch (took longer than expected as we need to boil off enough to ensure we could add dissolved honey and not exceed 20L in the fermenter), cooling for an hour and a half, add the honey, activate the yeast, aeriate the wort and finally pitch the yeast. Done for about 3.30pm.
Fermentation took a while to start, about 12 hours longer than normal but we’d intentionally pitched at a lower temperature than normal and kept the heating off in the utility room to try to stress the yeast a bit for a bit more flavour. We figured that Nottingham could handle it easily enough.
And the name of this brew? Dark HASH (Honey And Single Hop).
Tonight (Wednesday) we’ll pitch the dry hops and see how things are going at the weekend.
Lessons learned: Have spares. Mike attempted to re-calibrate the pH meter and it really didn’t want give a consistent reading, even off the buffer solution. With no spare we had to brew without knowing the pH. A new one has been bought and a spare will be ordered shortly. Also ordered a spare water pump for the cooling system. They’re cheap and if ours fails then we can’t cool the wort, which would be awkward. We already have both a kettle element and an induction hob so that covers us for boiling. There’s no other critical active kit fortunately.