Rye IPA #2

After a bit of a break from brewing in August, I'm back with thoughts of the Fall and good beers for that season. On my wife's suggestion, I decided to refine the Rye IPA I brewed a while ago, hoping to make improvements. For this one, it's basically the same recipe but 1) water adjustment as per the suggestions of some people at the home brew club and Gordon Strong's "Brewing Better Beer" and 2) substitution of hops because I didn't have free home-grown Cascade like I did last time.

Rye IPA #2

6.25# Briess 2-Row
2.25# Rye Malt
4oz C20
4oz C40

.875 oz Warrior, 13.7%, 60 min
1/3 oz Cascade, Centenial, Chinook, 7.7%, 9.8%, 15.6%, 5min
1/3 oz Cascade, Centenial, Chinook, 7.7%, 9.8%, 15.6%, 1min
1/3 oz Cascade, Centenial, 7.7%, 9.8%, dry, 7 days
1 1/3 Chinook, 15.6% dry, 7 days

Water: Brookline, MA (soft) with the following added to the brewing water:
1/2 tsp Calcium Chloride
1 tsp Gypsum

Mash at 150F for 80 minutes.

Brewed on 9/8/13
Hit my mash temp pretty much spot on after the mash had been going for 15minutes. I like the speed with which my new Bayou Classic SP-10 burner heats up my water.

Got slightly more than 4 gallons pre-boil.

The boil went OK except that the propane tank ran dry at around 20 minutes left, so I had to finish the boil on the stove. Sucks.

Cooled to 110F using the IC and stirring, then squeezed out the liquid from the hop bag into the beer and placed in 67F ambient water to finish cooling.

Pitched a few hours later when the wort was at 72F and placed the 5 gallon better bottle in a bin of 67F water.

Post-boil OG was 1.054, a bit low.

9/12, 5pm
After 4 days of moderately active fermentation, high krausen seems to have passed. The fermenter is bubbling very slowly but some yeast remains on top of the beer. I moved the carboy out of the water bath.

9/23/13
Racked into a 3 gal Better Bottle and added the dry hops. It is a pain to get the leaf hops into the narrow mouth of the Better Bottle. I think from now on I will use pellet  hops for dry hopping.

10/1/13
Bottled, going for 2.2 vol of CO2. Got 26 bottles. The leaf hops caused all sorts of clogging in the bottling spigot and bottling wand. The bottling did not go smoothly at all as a result, and I had to reach into the beer with sanitized kitchen gloves to clean out the clog. I would not be surprised if the beer gets infected or oxidized because of all this. Next time, I'll try to use only pellet hops for dry-hopping. The hydrometer sample was reading 1.010, as expected a little too low.