Homebrew - Whiteley Series Double IPA

This was a $70 kit which raised a few eyebrows but after doing a few semi hoppy beers I really wanted to kick it up a notch. Googling led me to people raving about the hops in this kit so I had to give it a try. Our friends Andy and Kylie were over from England so we got them to help with the brew.

This was the first time we had dry hopped and we crushed the hop pellets a little and bunged them into the primary after a few days. When bottling we got worried about how much crap was floating in the fermenter and I started to wonder if just chucking in the hops was a good idea. I think next time we will loosely bag them to make it easy to get them out again.

Ingredients: Whiteley Series Double IPA, Extract kit from True Brew
Brew:        30 Apr 2011
Bottle:      12 May 2011 (12)
Ready:       ???
Summary:     Primary 12 days, Condition ???

The beer tasted fantastic, very hoppy and crisp. Gemma could not drink them fast enough - but she does love a good IPA. There was a ton of yeast in each bottle. Some of them were actually quite gross to look at and you had to leave a good inch at the bottom or get giant lumps of crud in your glass. I think this is because we stuck to the recipe like glue and against my better judgement did not use a secondary. I am starting to feel more confident about brewing and I get the feeling the kit recipes are optomised to get people beer quickly using one fermenter. If I were to do this kit again I would primary for 14 days (dry hop after a few), then rack and transfer the hops into the secondary for another 14 days. Maybe even dry hop again when racking.

Brew

Bottle