13:04. 45 minutes of boil is done. Just threw in the Goldings flavouring hops, which will boil for another 14 minutes. The fermenter is ready; I just bleach the bugger and scrub it if there're any spots, but that's the joy of glass... easy to clean.
13:20 Late hops into the boil, then flameout. Time to get the ice blocks into the brew; not made easier by the fact that I'm supposed to be cooking lunch on the same stovetop as well.
13:56 All done. Funny thing about beer brewing - there are great swathes of inactivity, followed by intense moments of focus & energy. Getting the ice bricks into the boiler was no simple task; I needed to enlist my wife's assistance to prevent the majority of the wort splashing out all over the stove.
But the ice-in-wort approach has merits. I still got the boiler into the sink and ran cold water up the side, but a couple of stirs of the iceblocks was all it took to drop the wort temperature quickly. A quick lunch, and then into the fermenter. Topped up with tap-water, and I pitched the yeast immediately.
The Safale S-04 has a fermentation range of 15-24C; our bar area is probably around the 16-17C mark at the moment, which means a slower fermentation, but a cleaner fermentation. With IPAs, you want to focus on the interplay of extra hops, extra bitterness, extra malt and extra body. Yeast esters would just make a mess of this. So a cooler ferment the better.
I now wait three days, and throw a bag of Goldings flowers into the fermenter as a dry-hop. I think Dave has the right idea here..... dry-hopping is great to add the fresh hop characteristics to the beer, but the fermentation activity can drive the aromas out the air-lock. Waiting three days (or once the krausen has started to settle) is a good idea, I reckon.
Now for the clean-up......
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