Citra IPA

I have been wanting to mess around with Citra hops for a while here since I heard a description of what they tasted like. The aroma gives off this grapefruit/passion fruit smell that filled the room up once I opened everything up. Very very fruity which should equal very very tasty in a nice IPA recipe. I had 5oz of hops that I wanted to get the most out of as well, so I went for a kind of "hop bursting" method of putting them into the beer. This is normally done by adding in the majority of the hops as late into the boil as you can. So I went with 1oz at 15 minutes left, 2oz at 10 minutes and 2oz at flame out hoping to maximize flavor while also adding bitterness to the beer. For the base beer I went with a very well known recipe out of Brewing Classic Styles. I re-pitched the yeast I used with my Peach Wheat beer since I am lazy and hate making starters.

Citra IPA

Malt:

12.75 lbs: Pale Ale Malt

1 lb: Crystal 10

.75 lbs: Munich

.25 lbs: Crystal 40

Hops:

.50 oz: Columbus 14.0aa @60min

1 oz: Citra 11.1aa @15min

2 oz: Citra 11.1aa @10min

2 oz: Citra 11.1aa @Flame Out

2 oz: Cascade 5.4aa Dry Hops

Misc:

1 Whirlfloc Tablet

Target OG: 1.067

Target FG: 1.014

IBU: ~55 (Rager)

Actual OG: 1.068

Actual FG: 1.008

Apparent Attenuation: 87.6%

ABV: 8%

ABW: 6.3%

Yeast:

White Labs California Ale (WLP001) (Repitched from Peach Wheat)

Hopville Recipe

Update 7.9.2010: Brew day went well, I missed my pre-boil gravity by a few points and had to add in 12oz of DME to bring it up. Beer is fermenting at 66 degrees.

Update 7.15.2010: Beer finished fermenting yesterday. I ran out of Citra on the brew day and my LHBS is out for the time being. I wanted to go ahead and get some dry hops on this beer so I went with some Type90 Cascade I had in the freezer. I will let that sit for a few days then keg everything up next week.

Update 7.20.2010: Kegged beer and set co2 regulator to 11psi to carbonate beer to 2.4 levels of co2. Beer dried out a bit more that I was hoping, but that was due to the 2nd gen yeast that was used. You can taste the hops up front. Not a ton of malt backbone but some is there. Hopefully this can get carbed up asap cause I can't wait to taste it.

Update 7.26.2010: This beer seemed to be a big hit yesterday at my brew club meeting. Beer is actually quite wonderful, tons of tropical fruit aromas and taste. I can't wait to do this one again. Tasting this before carbing, I was a little scared that something was wrong. Carbonation seems to add the missing link for this beer. At 1st i thought it had dried out a bit much, but if it was any sweeter the hops wouldn't pop as much. I like a dryer IPA anyway. Review to come later.