(No such thing as a) Clone

We've really never nailed down an IPA that we felt worthy of promoting.  That said, we've only tried a few times so just picking up that effort, we found the recipe for Racer 5 IPA in a recent issue of Zymurgy.

No such thing as a clone in our opinion, rather some guidelines to reconstruct someone else's product that we happen to respect.  Our deviations due to available ingredients:  We did not use Belgian CaraPils and we replaced Cascade hops with Centennial.

The recipe (as we brewed it):

10.5 lbs. 2-row domestic Pale

1.5 lbs. Malted Wheat

0.5 lbs. Crystal 20L

0.5 lbs. CaraPils

Mash at 152.  Sparge at 178

Hop Schedule (90 min boil)

60 min:  0.5oz Columbus 14%AA

20 min:  1.0oz Columbus 14%AA

20 min:  1.0oz Amarillo 9%AA

10 min:  0.5oz Columbus 14%AA

10 min:  0.5oz Centennial 9%AA

Dry Hop

1.0oz Columbus 14%AA

0.5oz Centennial 9%AA

Yeast:  White Labs California V

Belgian Rye 2.0 and Misc

Starting with Misc:

- We bottled 5 gallons of the brown ale that was used as the base for two other souring projects that make up 35 gallon's worth of longer term projects.  As it turns out, the base beer (thankfully) very good.  It is a rich brown ale that the malt is surprisingly not heavy handed.  Instead the aroma and taste are closer to dried fruits.  This one is just now bottle conditioning and we'll be ready to provide samples in about a week.

-  If there was a benefit of running the Napa to Sonoma half marathon, (beyond raising raising a lot of money for a good cause, getting in shape, being around great people. . .) it's that when it was over we finally got to visit Lagunitas Brewing.  Great tour and people.  Need to head back when the beer garden is open.  That's where all of the experimental goodness we see in their Twitter feed meets the public.

Variations on a Theme Tasting

It took some time, but the three Imperial Porters were finally ready for their blind tasting.  The Variations on a Theme experiment results are below.  Also, pretty sure that our blatant use of OM's album cover will go unnoticed, but we're more than happy to donate samples if that's not the case.