by Jeremy Sambrooks
This is the recipe for the beer I made that won the inaugural Fremantle Beerfest ‘Backyard to Bottle Shop’ competition. The competition stipulated that the entry had to be an American-style IPA. I had brewed an IPA before, but had yet to experiment with dry hopping, which I figured was going to necessary in order to make an impact with the judges.
In a search for inspiration, I stumbled across the recipe for Pliny the Elder, which is considered by many to be the finest example of the double IPA style. I decided I would use the Pliny recipe as a starting point, then scaled it down to fit the BJCP guidelines for American IPA. I made a couple more small changes inspired by Jamil Zainasheff’s IPA recipe ‘Hoppiness is an IPA’, adding Amarillo hops and a small amount of Munich malt for a little extra complexity.
There was no time for a practice batch and thankfully, my very first batch of Rapid Fire IPA turned out beautifully and to this day is the best IPA and possibly the best beer I’ve ever brewed.
RAPID FIRE IPA
OG: 1.060
FG: 1.012
IBU: 60 (Tinseth)
ABV: 6.3%
Colour: 7 SRM
Assumed mash efficiency: 75%
Boil: 60 minutes
Post-boil volume: 19 litres
Fermentables
Pale Malt 4.2kg
Crystal 15L 400g
Munich Type 2 200g
Carapils 200g
Crystal 40L 100g
Mash @ 66C for 60 minutes
Hops
Columbus @ 60 mins 10g
Columbus @ 30 mins 10g
Centennial @ 10 mins 25g
Simcoe @ 5 mins 25g
Amarillo @ flameout 25g
Columbus dry hop @ 7 days 20g
Amarillo dry hop @ 7 days 20g
Centennial dry hop @ 10 days 20g
Simcoe dry hop @ 10 days 20g
Crash chill after 13 days
Yeast
1 packet (rehydrated) Fermentis Safale US-05
Carbonated to 2.25 volumes CO2.