Imperial Raspberry IPA

This beer is pretty experimental for me because I haven’t seen a lot of similar beers on the market and I have been told this is a bad idea. But I keep imagining this fruity hoppy beer in my head that sounds so amazing and I want to prove these negative Nancy’s wrong. Now I have made fruit beers in the past but this process will be a little different. This will more or less be making an IPA, but we are going to try to fit in the fruit beer where we can. The major problem I face is that I don’t want to overpower the light raspberry flavor with heavy hop bitterness. I’m shooting for a 30-35 IBU IPA that has a balanced hop and fruit profile. So below is the recipe and how I made it. I made a few changes from the FB post recipe last minute because I was a little indecisive.

Depending on how much of the sugars from the fruit get fermented this beer should reach an ABV of 8-9%. The OG will be 1.080+. We won’t be able to account for the fruit because of where we are adding them so the actual OG is nearer 1.090. The FG will be in the 1.020-1.027 because of the unfermented fruit sugars and because it’s a big beer. This is good because being a fruit beer a little residual sweetness is ok and we don’t want the bitter hops to overpower the sweet raspberries. This will be a little darker beer around 15-20 SRM hopefully with a nice deep red coloration that goes along with it from the fruit.

• 6 pounds amber DME
• 3 pounds light DME
• 1 pound of crystal 10 S/G
• 1 pound of crystal 80 S/G
• 1 pound of Canadian honey S/G (for a little more sweet)
• 2 ounces Citra at 5 and 20 min
• 1 ounce centennial Dry hopped in secondary
• 1 ounce Pearl at 60 min
• SafeAle-05 American Ale Yeast (with a six hour starter)
• As well as this I will be using 3lb of raspberry puree made for brewing.

Directions-        

• Get your starter ready at least 6 hours in advance or the day before.  See the yeast starter post for instructions.
• Sanitize all your equipment throughout the process.
• Bring 3 gal of water to 160F turn off heat and steep all of the specialty grains for 30 min (never allowing the temperature to drop below 150).
• After 30 min rinse the grains with 5cup of room temp water.
• Bring to a boil and add in DME (or LME whatever you have).
• When it returns to a boil after DME addition, add the pearl hops and start the 60 min timer.
• Stir occasionally until 20 min remain and add 1 ounce Citra hops.
• Then at 2 minutes add 1 more ounce of Citra.
• Cool your beer to pitching temp and pitch yeast.

Fermentation-

• You have probably realized that there is no fruit in the beer yet. That is because boiling the fruit destroys fruit aroma. As well as losing aroma when you fruit will now have to experience primary fermentation. Most of the sugars from the fruit will be fermented along with all the rest of them, and color might be also be lost. We want to keep some sweetness and color. By adding some of the fruit at the end of the primary fermentation we will limit the amount of the fruits sugars to be fermented.  Doing this at the end of the primary will also allow the beer will also make it more resistant to infection. As well as that, adding some of the fruit to the secondary will allow for more fruit flavor and sugars to be preserved. So here are the fruit and dry hopping instructions.
• For sanitation we will heat 2lb of fruit to 160 for 20 minutes. Cover and let cool to room temp.
• Add the 2lb of fruit puree near the completion of the primary fermentation (3-5 days) let beer ferment for another 2-3 days or until the fermentation has slowed buy quite a bit.
• Cold crash the beer for 24hrs and rack beer to a secondary fermenter be sure to leave as much of the yeast cake behind as possible.
• Add the last pound of puree and the whole leaf centennial to the secondary and leave for 3-5 more days.
• Cold crash the beer for an addition 24 hours.
• Then rack it into a keg or bottle it. I’ll let you know hoe mine turns out.