Citra Imperial IPA Tasting

Look: a little gunsmoke is visible as soon as I pop the bottle. Some sediment is suspended in the glass, which is an effect I really like in my IPAs. Thin, white foamy head that doesn't retain very long and quickly ends up as thin layer of bubbles around the sides of the glass. The beer has a little bit of spotty lacing.

Smell: though not as pungent as I would've liked, it has a big passion fruit, citrus, tropical aroma with some papaya and mango as well. Very pleasant aroma and I'm very pleased with this.

Taste: follows the nose well with a delicious blend of passion fruit, papaya, pineapple and some mango with a little bit of citrus zest. The malt is hardly detectable, which is something I appreciate.

Feel: medium bodied and a little more full bodied for a DIPA than I think I would want. The carbonation is good. The alcohol isn't noticeable and its not overly bitter but there's no sweetness to be found either.

Drinkability: fairly easy drinking and though its a little big for a session beer, its still something you could have a few pints of without a problem.

Overall Impression

Overall, I thought this was pretty good and with some tweaks, I can see it being very excellent. There are some adjustments I'm going to make to improve it, but otherwise, I am pretty happy with how this one came out.

Adjustments for Next Time

I'm going to adjust the malt bill. I'm thinking of adding carapils, reducing the caramel malt but using a higher lovibond malt for color adjustment, using some wheat for head formation/retention, and some sugar to lighten the body. I'm thinking:

11# 2-row malt

1# Carapils

.5# 120L Caramel

.5# US White Wheat

1.75# table sugar

I'm also going to up the hops. 93 IBU is good but there could be more hoppiness to it to really make this beer an exceptional DIPA. I've been tinkering with it and I think the goal should be to get to 120IBU but to stick with all Citra hops. I think the schedule might look more like:

1.5 oz @ 60 minute

2 oz @ 30 minute

1 oz @ 15 minute

2 oz @ 5 minute

1.5 oz @ turn off

1 oz dry hopped

That gets me up to 118.9 IBU. The issue is... that's a lot of hops. This recipe lost a lot of volume to vegetal matter and it was only using 6 oz of hops all together. This uses 9 oz. So I think the plan will be to brew more wort and to use a hop bag for the dry hopping.

Blog Posts About This Beer

Bottling the Citra DIPA

Citra Double IPA Label

Citra DIPA Brew Day

Bottling the Citra DIPA

Annnnd the Citra Imperial IPA is bottled! I am surprised how much volume I lost due to the 4 oz of pellet hops from the fermentor and the 2 oz of full flower hops from the dry hopping. The next time I brew such a hoppy beer, I'm going to have to do a better job stopping that from happening. Bagging the hops would probably help or using some other piece of equipment, and maybe brewing a larger batch so it ends up with more beer in the final product.

As always, did a little into a glass just to see how it is right now. A little chill on the glass because I stuck it in the fridge in the glass to get it to slightly above room temperature before sampling it.

While you can't really tell what the final product is going to be like from this given that its pretty flat, you can tell that the dry hopping really added a lot in the nose of this beer. Big, tropical hop character in the nose and a little more bitterness in the taste than it was before it was dry hopped.

I tried pitching some yeast (used White Labs California yeast) to the bottling bucket to see if that helps my history of under-carbonated beer.

I also printed out the label I posted earlier and just taped them on really quickly so they look pretty. I'll bottle condition them for a week and then we'll see how they are. Can't wait!

The photos are a little poor because I was taking them with my phone's camera. Cheers!

Citra Double IPA Label

Fermentation is pretty much complete. I tried a sample and it is quite tasty. Citra is really a very interesting hop and there's really nothing quite like it. The passion fruit character is unlike anything I've had elsewhere, along with hints of melon, papaya, pineapple, and grapefruit. It has just enough malt backbone to balance it out a little bit but not so much as to make it sweet and its still pretty dry.

For a more powerful aroma, I'm going to be dry hopping it with 2 oz of even MORE Citra hops. I've never dry hopped before so I've been looking at different dry hopping methods. I think I'm just going to let the hops loose in the carboy until I bottle.

And speaking of bottling, I worked up a simple label for this beer. Basically just a quick and easy filter of a image of hops and text added in Photoshop. Let me know what you think!

EDIT: Transferred the beer onto 2 oz of Citra hops for some dry hopping action. After reading a bit about dry hopping, I decided just to do the hops directly into the beer so I don't have to worry about sterilizing my hop bag.

But on a sad note, 4 oz of dry pellet hops led to a serious about of trub at the bottom. Holy moly!

That's about 1 gallon of unusable stuff. That's the price you pay for high IBUs. Cheers!

Citra DIPA Brew Day

Finally, an all grain batch goes (relatively) smoothly!

That's a lot of Citra hops...

This is the first beer that I made a yeast starter for. Since the original gravity is going to be kind of high on this one, a yeast starter helps the yeast ferment a bit better.

I got my strike water to 165 and when added to my grain, I got a mash temperature of 150. Its a little lower than I have done in the past, but this should help the beer dry out a little bit more. I don't think there's anything worse than a sweet DIPA. I was aiming for 7 gallons of wort and boiling it down to 5.5, but I ended up getting 6.5 and boiling down to 5. I wanted some extra for a 5 gallon batch because with a DIPA, you end up losing a lot of volume to vegetal matter from the hops.

I had an extra .1 oz of hops so I added that to the 5 minute addition so as not to add more bitterness. I also decided to add some Irish moss to the beer to clarify it a bit. Once I stopped the boil and started cooling down to get to pitching temperature, I noticed the ridiculous amount of hops floating around. You can kinda see it here...

And after aerating, pitched a nice amount of California ale yeast.

Overall, had a relatively easy brew day. I'm planning on bottling the saison tomorrow. I'm gonna be using my flip top bottles, which are 16 oz so hopefully it goes quick. Tonight, we're celebrating with a trip to Bobbique! Cheers.