Introduction
As we've mentioned above, this is our third attempt at creating an American IPA, and more specifically a West Coast IPA. Heavy in booziness, and hop flavour, in theory it shouldn't be too difficult to get right, right? You'd think so, but it seems we're still plagued by an all-too-familiar flavour, a cloying sweetness that is undermining the tropical fruit and other desirable hop flavours that we're striving to get here.
Let's take a look at the key areas of how this one turned out, and drill down into where we think we went wrong.
Appearance
This beer certainly looks how it should. We stripped back the grain bill to be only 2-row ale malt to really simplify things and rule out the grist as a source of any off-flavours or cloying sweetness. As a result of this, it's a little lighter in colour than it probably should be. Many examples these days feature a touch of Munich malt or other specialty malts to add a touch of colour, but we feel the colour is still pretty good. It has cleared up nicely after a couple of months conditioning in the keg, and pours with a nice, fluffy white head that leaves some pretty decent lacing on the glass.
Aroma
The aroma is pretty good on this one too, featuring some notable citrus and fruit forward hop flavours. Not much from the malt or yeast as you'd expect, and a tiny hint of the lingering sweetness that has plagued us comes through on the nose.
Flavour
This is where we've been struggling with these beers. Starting off with mouthfeel and it's excellent and exactly where it should be for this style. Right in the middle of the range, certainly not thin and watery, and certainly not full and thick either.
We carbonate all of our beers at around the same level of 2.5-2.6 or so, so that is exactly where we like it as well, with a decent amount of fizz without being too overpowering or leaving you feeling too bloated after a pint or two.
There is a firm bitterness, definitely towards the upper limit of what we like for this particular style. It's firm, but not aggressive, so you know it's there, and doesn't linger for too long in the after taste. Given the relatively high alcohol content, it works well.
Hop flavour is decent as well, but we still have this lingering sweetness that is kind of hard to explain. It's been a common theme in all three attempts we've made at this beer style, so what is it? Well, we think we've figured it out, but let's go through a quick recap of our previous attempts to see where we thought we'd gone wrong previously as we piece this all together.
Our first attempt way back in 2022, and looking back on our notes we had similar comments about residual sweetness and too much bitterness. We thought we had included too many specialty malts in the grist that caused this to happen, and that may well have contributed to it, but looking back we don't believe it was the main cause.
Our second attempt was the Awesome Foursome West Coast IPA (in 2024), that also turned out way too bitter, and we ended up dumping it down the drain before we finished the keg. We simplified the grist a little with this one as well, but we also discovered at this point that our water profile, or more specifically, the Brewfather Hoppy water profile was the culprit, with an insanely high sulfate level that we believed was stripping out all the hop aromas from the beer, and really leaving only the residual malt sweetness and hop bitterness.
We discussed this further in a separate post about high bitterness and low hop flavour/aroma, and even reached out to Adam Makes Beer who featured our question in one of his Q&A videos where he confirmed our suspicions that the sulfate levels in this water profile were far too high.
So this was it, the road to redemption, and hence the name for this beer that was meant to see us nailing this style. And although this would arguably be our best attempt yet, it's still nowhere near good enough. With a stripped back grain bill and adjusted water profile, there's no way we were going to get that residual sweetness this time, right? Well, turns out we did.
So what is the cause?
Centennial Hops
Yep, centennial hops. These hops have featured in all three of our West Coast IPA's, and there's obviously something about the way we're using them that just makes them completely dominate the flavour profile and cause this residual sweetness. It's hard to explain but we'd liken it perhaps to candied orange? Sounds better than it actually is, but has definitely been mistaken for malt sweetness, which we know is definitely not the case for this beer.
 |
| Are Centennial hops responsible for this residual sweetness flavour? |
We ended up doing a second dry hop in the keg for this one, with a bunch of leftover simcoe and citra hops which helped introduce some more hop flavour, but over time the centennial sweetness is still coming back to the fore, and it just doesn't taste like a West Coast IPA should.
In all three recipes we've made, Centennial was one of 3 or 4 different hop varieties being used (in equal parts overall), so we're totally perplexed at how it can just completely overpower everything else.
It's incredibly frustrating that even after three attempts we still haven't got this one right. There will be a fourth attempt, and it will not be featuring centennial hops.
If anyone else has experienced anything like this with Centennial hops, please reach out and let us know that we're not going insane! As we know Centennial hops are incredibly popular, and common in hop forward beers, so why are we getting such strange results from using them?
Competition Results
We entered this beer into the Flat Rock Brewing Club homebrew competition for 2025, where it scored 27 points. Not a particularly strong score at all, and even lower than our first attempt that scored 32 points back in 2023.
Although disappointing, we're not at all surprised by this score. We haven't received scoresheets back from this competition yet but will update this with any additional information if and when they do come through.
Conclusion
It feels good to have written all this down and document our journey, and although frustrating it's certainly been a learning experience. We definitely feel we learn just as much from our bad beers as our great ones, or at least that's what we're telling ourselves.
We'll have another crack at this beer style in the future, and will likely stick with this 100% 2-row grist, and will look at potentially using the tried and true Citra, Mosaic and Galaxy hop combination that has been proven countless times to be a winner and to see if we can finally get the proverbial monkey off our back with this beer style.
The only other common factor between the three beers is the yeast variety, US-05 that we used, but surely that couldn't be causing this sweetness, right? Guess we'll find out in due course.
Related Articles
No comments:
Post a Comment