subject: How to Brew An India Pale Ale (IPA) [print this page] How to Brew An India Pale Ale (IPA) How to Brew An India Pale Ale (IPA)
Description of an India Pale Ale or IPA
The beer type IPA comes in two variations. You have the English and the American IPA. The English IPA is the original with all English ingredients, but nowadays malts and hops from all over the world is used. Pale ale malt and other light malts are used, and some caramel malt can be added. However, the malt taste is in the background in this beer. In the IPA the majority of taste and aroma comes from the hops. The IPA has a slightly golden to deep copper color and only little malty taste. The hops, used for brewing IPA, gives the beer a medium to strong bitterness, with a characteristic flavor and aroma of citrus, flowers, fruit and pine.
Target Values for an IPA
When brewing an IPA, you must be within the values in the style guide you see below. These are your target values when you are designing a recipe. However, as a home brewer you decide if you want to make the beer sweeter, with more alcohol, more bitterness or whatever you think will make the beer better.
Original Gravity (OG): 1.056 - 1.075
Final Gravity (FG): 1.010 - 1.018
Color (EBC): 15 - 35
Bitterness (IBU): 40 - 60+
Alcohol (Vol%): 5.5 - 7.5
Basic IPA recipe
I have made a simple IPA recipe for you. The amount of ingredients in the recipe is for one liter of water. This means, that if you have 30 liters of water in your kettle, then you must multiply with 30 when you make beer.
Ingredients:
Pilsner Malt (7 EBC): 180 grams/liter
Cara Munich Malt (100 EBC): 30 grams/liter
Cara Amber Malt (60 EBC): 50 grams/liter
Chinook hops (12.6 Alpha%): 2 gram/liter
Cascade hops (6.5 Alpha%): 2 gram/liter
Yeast: You can pick any yeast suitable for ale
Brewing an IPA:
Heat the water to 67 C and add all the malt
Stir and maintain the temperature at 67 C for 60 minutes
Raise the temperature to 74 C and keep it at 74 C for 30 minutes
Seperate the mash from the wort with your strainer
Sparge the mash with 74 C water untill you have the equivalent volume of wort in the kettle as you had water to begin with (1 liter in this case)
Raise the temperature to 100 C - boiling
The total boiling time is 60 minutes from you add the first wort to you begin cooling the wort
First add 1 gram/liter Chinook for 60 minutes total boil time
Then add 1 gram/liter Chinook for 45 minutes total boil time
Then add 1 gram/liter Cascade for 10 minutes total boil time
Then add 1 gram/liter Cascade for 1 minute total boil time
After 60 minutes of hopping the beer, start chilling the wort
When the wort is at fermentation temperature, pour it to the sanitized fermenter bucket
Add the yeast and keep the fermenter bucket at fermentation temperature
When the fermentation has stopped, transfer the beer to a sanitized fermenter bucket for secondary fermentation
Add sugar to carbonate the beer to get the desired CO2 pressure, and then bottle the beer
Values for this IPA
OG: 1064
FG: 1016
Color (EBC): 31
Bitterness (IBU): 69
Alcohol (Vol%): 6.3
These values are within the limits of the target values of an India Pale Ale or IPA.
