Once every few weeks, Sunday means it’s time for me to get the kitchen stinking like hops, with everything covered in syrup and malt dust. Brew day!
Today I’m working on an Imperial Red that will be tapped in August, at what’s likely to become the rowdiest backyard wedding Mattapan has ever seen. The style also means that I’m trying to execute a few techniques I’ve never tried before.
The malt base on this thing (one pound Crystal 40L, a half pound each of Crystal 120L and Victory, two ounces of 300L Chocolate, and a whole mess of LME) comes from Jamil Zainasheff‘s West Coast Blaster. And the hop charges (two ounces each Amarillo and Tettnang) come from the Cinder Cone Red I had at Deschutes in Portland last month. Mirror Mirror gets all the hype, but this thing absolutely blew it away. No contest.
This is my first time working with Chocolate malt, and my first partial grain mash. My $5 thermometer’s getting a workout. And because I’m tossing massive amounts of extract into a beer I’m hoping to keep reddish, not black, and because the hop efficiency on my last high-gravity effort probably wasn’t what it could be, this will be my first time doing a late extract addition. And I plan on dry-hopping the hell out of this thing – another first. We’ll see how it all turns out.