You know where this is from.

UPDATE: 11 December – we bottled this over the weekend with an FG of 1.015. It tastes great already…

So after the debacle of the autumn ale that never was (the less said, the better), it was decided to move on to pastures anew. After an interlude of brewing an old faithful, in the form of a White House Honey Porter partial mash out of a box, we decided to try and use up some of what was contained in what Andrew dubbed ‘the granary’.

So we had some chocolate malt. Some Special B, whatever the hell that actually is, some pale malt, some other stuff. You get the picture. This is where Beersmith came to our rescue. For a few squid we can now design recipes, and thus achieve spectacular brewing failures with lighting like efficiency. We really liked the Hopfather Double IPA we put together earlier this year, so we thought we’d combine the hop-pocalypse aspect of that with our surfeit of chocolate malt and put together an IPA. And because it’s our first bespoke recipe, it’s a ‘Speculative IPA’.

While there was some concern that we may have over-cooled the wort before topping up, the apocalyptic level of krausen a mere 12 hours later certainly put paid to that.

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Here’s the particulars:

Speculative IPA
Grains: Munich, Pale Malt, Carafa 1, Chocolate, Special B
Hops: Chinook (60 min), Cascade, Magnum (30 min), Goldings (15 min), Goldings, Chinook (Dry hop – if I can be arsed)
Yeast: American Ale II (Wyeast #1272)
OG: 1.050
FG: 1.015