Habañero Black IPA

Originally I was going to make this recipe an Imperial Black IPA but leave it to brewday complications to shift the beer style a bit... I've been tweaking this recipe for a few weeks now, trying to decide the best hop usage as well as dark malts, knowing I wanted to use the back stock of Sinamar I had. For those of you that don't know what Sinamar is -- it's a food grade coloring used to mimic the SRM of the wort without lending too much, or any roasted malt character to the beer. Weyermann makes a pretty good product so I decided to order some online a while back. Anyway, I first heard about Sinamar from Jeff Bagby, from his "Black Lie" Black IPA, which he had a lot of success with. I went back and forth on how much to add to the boil, but I can safely say I added enough. As I was putting together the recipe I felt I wanted a little bit of the dark malt character so I last minute decided to add some black patent just for the ashy flavor that certain carafas gives off. The idea behind using Sinamar is to get away from too much roasted flavor from the darker malts. I'm aiming for a clean bitterness from the hops and not too much astringency from typical highly modified dark malts.

The recipe was complete. I had a pretty smooth going brewday until the bittering hop addition got away from me due to chatting with some neighbors. My first hop addition didn't make it into the boil until 15 minutes late. Now that I had a far too condensed wort I added some water to dilute it a bit. I over did it. I then added some corn sugar and tried balancing it out once more. I was close enough. Instead of hitting the 1.080 I ended up with 1.072 OG. Regardless, it smells incredible.

Habañero Black IPA Recipe (not including the corn sugar or water top up) 75 min Boil Brewed on 4/29/13

15# Pale 2 Row
2.25# Rye Malt
1# Crystal 60L
.5# Black Patent
8oz Sinamar

2oz Magnum @ 60 min
2oz Amarillo @ 15 min
2oz Simcoe @ 0 min

WLP 090 (White Labs - San Diego Super Yeast)

I plan to add the habañeros after I transfer to a secondary fermentor. Still deciding on how much to add.. this one may just be a guess and check. I'll do an update on this beer in a week or so...

4/30/13 Here is a shot of the primary fermentation at initial krausen. Probably sitting around 66-68 degrees inside the fermentor.

5/1/13 It's been about 36 hours since I pitched the yeast and the blow off was definitely necessary. I had to clean up a little bit but for the time being, it's only going to keep making a mess...