Rebrew: Citra IPA

As Jeremy and I have really started to dial in our all-grain process, we've gone back to a couple of beers we brewed last summer and brewed them again. I'm still on enough of a learning curve that we've been able to noticeably improve on those earlier attempts.

In particular, we re-brewed a Russian Imperial Stout early this spring which we'd done in the fall. The original beer was pretty solid, but lacked the velvety, chocolatey notes which really needed to shine for it to be great. We treated the water with a mix of Calcium Choloride (CaCl2) and Gypsum (CaSO4) this time around instead of a single CaSO4 adjustment in the fall. We also pitched onto yeast cakes from ten gallons of Ordinary Bitter brewed the week prior. Between those two small tweaks, we ended up with a far better end product. The aforementioned chocolate and coffee notes were there. Using a substantially larger pitch of yeast got us to a better finishing gravity, and using a slightly different carbonation level produced just the right level of carbonation.

So up next, we're re-brewing our Citra IPA from last summer. It was already a damn good beer, so we wanted to brew it again this year. However, given the opportunity to tweak a few things I wanted to tune up the malt profile a bit and accentuate the unique character Citra brings to the party. Based on the recent process improvements we've made to improve on our hop character, I'm pretty confident we'll get there by using a low temperature whirlpool addition. With the malt character, we're going to use an English Ale yeast (Wyeast 1335) which should accentuate the bread / biscuit character a bit more than a clean american ale yeast. We'll probably also tweak the water adjustments a bit and go with a mix of calcium chloride and gypsum instead of strictly gypsum.

The yeast starter is going and brewday is Sunday. I'll have some results in a couple of weeks!

Holy F#*@ing Citra Ice Cream

I had dinner at Revolution Brewing here in Chicago a week or so ago for one of my buddy's birthdays. I'm not sure whether I'm just a sucker for good marketing, but I signed up for their mug club after the first time I ate dinner there and find myself going back on a pretty regular basis at this point.

In any case, on this occasion I had some of the standards I've grown to love and tried a few new things. Their Eugene (robust) Porter is a consistently quality beer. My wheelhouse tends to be IPAs and shockingly, I pass over their IPA to drink the Eugene instead. Their Institutionalized Barleywine was up on draft, so I opted for a small pour of it with dessert. It poured a deep, clear red and simply blew me away on the first sip. It was rich, complex and remarkably drinkable for a 9.5% beer.

But the real highlight of the evening was the Citra ice cream. I have no idea what process they used to extract the hop "essence" of citra and get it into that ice cream, but it worked. Phenomenally well. The mango, pineapple, tropical-fruity, slightly catty flavor came through and worked perfectly with the basic vanilla ice cream. I detected some bitterness, but it was largely the aroma / flavor you'd get from the volatile oils and not isomerized alpha acids that came through.

Being somewhat of a food nerd as well, I am absolutely going to try to recreate this so I can consume it in massive quantities.

If you live in Chicago, go try it. If you don't live in Chicago, go try it the next time you visit. And if you don't visit Chicago and you're enough of a beer nerd to be reading this, you should give it a second thought. The craft beer and food scene here is worth it.