This Saturday we will be bringing the APA Leonardo (Leonardo – 9stripe Brewing)to the meeting for the style of the month.
The purpose of our clubs style of the month is to let everyone bring in their version of a certain style for everyone to taste. This way you can get feedback and get some ideas about what works and don’t work.
I gotta say, this Leonardo will fit into the “what don’t work” slot.
I do not know where it went wrong really. I was using the hop burst technique of throwing all the hops in late. But using enough to keep the bittering where it should be.
I have used this a lot recently and it has worked great. This time however. I ended up with a beer that is not only, not nearly bitter enough for an APA, it has almost no hop taste or aroma.
I chose to use chinook and centennial. Perfect hop choices for this style. According to beersmith, if I throw them in around the 12 minute mark, I will end up with 40 IBU. Perfect for the style. And 12 minutes is perfect to get all the flavor out if them.
In reality what I got was in my estimation, about 15 IBU. And very little flavor. This beer would make a decent blonde or maybe cream ale. But certainly not an APA. Not even close.
It’s so far off that I even considered the possibility that I had used the wrong hops. But I went and checked the garbage can. And there were the packages of 13.2% chinook and 10.7% centennial.
It’s a drinkable beer. Just not what I wanted. But now to figure out what went wrong. After having great results before, then this one being way off, I’m not sure where to begin. But this will need a re brew
9stripe Brewing 