American-Style India Pale Ale

The Happy Head home-brewery on it's inaugural brewing day. Added to our arsenal this time around is a 15-gallon boil kettle and a home-made mash tun which would allow us to switch to the "all-grain" brewing method. We had been looking forward to this for a while, and so after only two extract batches, we waved goodbye to liquid extract forever. The first all grain batch would be an IPA in the American style, strongly emphasizing hop character but hopefully staying balanced.

We couldn't wait to try out this mash tun and get familiar with the all-grain method, which we knew would help us gain much more control over the process. 

After dough-in we mashed for a few minutes to get everything saturated and break up any dough balls which had formed.  One big error we knew would impact the results was an erroneously long sparging process. We hit the already mashed grains with much hotter water and then let it sit for an entire hour (we accidentally repeated the mash rest), so our first all-grain experiment was not without some mistakes.

After the hour-long mash, before letting the runoff into the kettle, we captured some "vorlauf" to recirculate to the top of the grain bed. 

The 15-gallon kettle allowed us to do a "full boil," so the entire wort is included in the kettle. It was a cool evening and a lot boiled off, but we were pretty close to the volume we expected.

We prepared a yeast starter in a growler and had a big volume to pitch once we chilled the wort. 

In a wonderfully synchronous way, our first all grain batch would also be our first batch on tap. We invested in a brand new, beautiful two-tap kegerator, and we can't wait to use it.

We research various strategies for force carbonating, and a few weeks into the fermentation, we racked into the keg and hit it with gas. We rocked it for about 30 minutes to help it carbonate, mostly because we were impatient to try it! After a couple hours, we hurriedly poured a glass, and of course the carbonation was still pretty lacking.

We debuted this batch at Marshall's 30th birthday party, which was a blast! As a gift, Marshall's twin brother, Marco, got him a set of glasses with the Happy Head logo. Party guests could chip in for the next batch and walk away with a cool souvenir.

The party was a great time, but the IPA turned out a bit less than we had hoped. It was heavy in bitterness and very alcoholic, which in and of itself was hurting the drinkability in a big way. Then, the hour long sparge definitely drew out some tannins and made this beer very drying and puckering in the mouthfeel. Our friends of course offered positive reviews, and it certainly went quickly, but we knew we had much to learn in the brewing process.