It seems like a lot of breweries are incorporating grape juice into their brews lately. I've been meaning for a while to try brewing an IPA with grape juice. Local homebrewing store Quirky Homebrew has a good selection of grape juice concentrates. So we picked that up from Quirky, even though we generally much prefer to do our shopping at CO-Brew.

Since the stove on our new apartment doesn't have enough vertical space over it for us to use our ten-gallon brewing pot, and because I am in any case adding a concentrated sugar source after the boil, this brew involved a partial boil in the five-gallon with the addition of water and concentrated grape juice after the boil is done. There's a huge amount of hops in the boil to compensate for this, and because the beer is, after all, an IPA. Because it's a partial mash, the numbers estimated by BrewTarget are look quite off here.

BeerXML for this recipe, generated by BrewTarget.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this batch turns out. I'm calling it I'm Not Drinking Any Fucking Merlot!, since we're already printing up labels for another batch and I don't have to write that on every label by hand.

Ingredients

  • 12 lb. Colorado Pilsner malt
  • 1 gal. concentrated Riesling juice
  • 2 oz. Magnum hops (12.4% A.A.) at 90 min.
  • 1 oz. German Magnum hops (12.7% A.A.) at 90 min.
  • 1 oz. Magnum hops (12.4% A.A.) at 75 min.
  • 2 oz. German Magnum hops (12.7% A.A.) at 75 min.
  • 1 oz. Motueka hops (6.6% A.A.) at 60 min.
  • 1 oz. Motueka hops (6.6% A.A.) at 45 min.
  • 2 oz. Azacca hops (12.8% A.A.) at 15 min.
  • 1 pouch White Labs WLP090 (San Diego Super Yeast, expired)
  • 1 oz. Nelson Sauvin hop pellets (11.9% A.A.), dry hop addition on 10 Feb.
  • 2 oz. Nelson Sauvin hop pellets (11.4% A.A.), dry hop addition on 10 Feb.

Procedure

Mashed in with about three gallons of dechlorinated tap water at 165℉; this brought the water to 140℉. Heated and stirred to bring it to 151℉, where it was held for a 60-minute mash. Pulled out the brew bag and grain, leaving a little under two and a half gallons of wort, then boiled for 90 minutes, cooled with the immersion chiller, and poured through a large sieve to strain out the massive amount of hops (more than four ounces per gallon of wort!), and poured into the concentrated grape juice, still only producing about three gallons total of fermentable wort. Topped off with dechlorinated water and pitched the yeast, then popped in an airlock and let it sit to ferment.

Brew day: 4 November 2018
Predicted original gravity: 1.078
Measured original gravity: 1.062
Estimated IBUs: 256.6
Predicted final gravity 1.0156
Predicted ABV: 8.2

Bottling day : 18 February 2019
Final gravity: 1.002
Estimated ABV: 8%

Yield:

  • 25 x 12 fl. oz. beer bottles
  • 4 x 500 mL beer bottles
  • 1 x 500 mL mead bottle
  • 3 x 22 fl. oz. beer bottles

Total yield:about 450 fl. oz., or about 3.5 gallons

Observations

  • 2018-11-07T12:03:00: Airlock is bubbling rapidly (finally! The WLP 090 was expired and we didn't make a starter.) There's definitely carbon dioxide being generated like crazy in the carboy.
  • 2019-01-01: Move to new bucket, discarding yeast.
  • 2019-02-10: Added three ounces of Nelson Sauvin pellets, loose, to the carboy.
  • 2019-02-18: Bottled, yielding 3.5 gallons of beer at 8% ABV.