Brew Day: Amber Wheat IPA

I’ve only had one Wheat IPA so far. At Toit in Indiranagar. Referencing their website, Toit states that the grain bill contains Munich, Wheat and Caramel malts and it is dry hopped with Chinook and Citra. It was a fairly opaque, cloudy and dark brown colored beer. And it made for one good IPA too.

With quite a bit of wheat malt on my hands and inspired by Toit’s offering, I decided to brew a Wheat IPA too. I have had a few nice, worthy IPAs and I’ve brewed some too but never one with wheat in the grain bill. So this was a bit of a challenge. With the grains at home, I decided to stick to the basics since this is my first Wheat IPA. My grain bill was just Pale Ale and Wheat, with a bit of dark caramel malts to deepen the color. This was done because my plan was to brew an Amber Wheat IPA.

My initial recipe had Aromatic malt too. But on later introspection, I decided to chuck Aromatic malt from the grain bill since I feared this would give the beer a bit of a stronger malty backbone and hide the wheat. I had some yeast starter left over from my other Wheat beers, Wheat Stout and Watermelon Wheat and that is what I used.

Once I finalized the grain bill, my next challenge was to zero in on the hops. IPAs are probably the more expensive beers brewed around the world due to the hops used in them and I may not be wrong in stating that the West Coast IPAs and the Imperial IPAs would be among the more expensive IPAs brewed. With that in mind, I decided on two hop additions during the boil to bring the IBUs to around 40. Of course, setting IBUs and maintaining it is easy for most beers. For an IPA the challenge is choosing which hops to dry hop with.

And that brought around some confusion. A fellow brewer gave me some Simcoe which I decided to use straight away. But I preferred 2 hops as part of the dry hopping regimen. Browsing through my hops (which isn’t a lot), I found some Cascade that I could use. The reason I stuck to two hops during the dry hop regimen was to keep things simple and not over complicate flavors and aroma in the IPA. There are IPAs out there with a lot more hops added during dry hopping but I guess simplicity has its charm.

Amber Wheat IPA (Tasting notes here)

Specifics

Batch size (litres): 8 litres
Type: All Grain

IBU: 40

SRM: 15

OG: 1.056

Grains and Sugars

900 grams Pale Ale
900 grams Wheat Malt
50 grams Crystal 120
50 grams Crystal 80
10 grams Roasted Barley

Hops
5 grams Aurora @ 45 min.

4 grams Northern Brewer @ 30 min.
7 grams Cascade, Dry hop, 5 days.
7 grams Simcoe, Dry hop, 5 days.

Yeast

Fermentis WB-06 Wheat Beer Yeast

Schedules

Mash at 66°C for 60 minutes

Sparged at 80°C for 30 minutes

Boiled for 45 minutes.