Today I brewed the first version of my Hoppy Gnome IPA.  It’s a modified version of a Green Flash West Coast IPA clone that I made a few months ago (the clone was actually my first all-grain batch and was very successful).  I dropped the amount of 60L crystal to lighten the color a bit, and swapped out some of the late hops for Citra.  I hope this will give it a softer hop profile.

All told, it went ok.  This was my first cold-weather brew with this mash tun, and I was not prepared for how quickly the mash temp dropped.  Still, I ended up with 82% mash efficiency, although I suspect it’ll be a tad dryer and more attenuated than planned (which means the already dominant hops might overwhelm the malt).

The cold did make the wort chill very fast (my tap water, lukewarm during the summer, now runs ice-cold into my wort chiller).  I got TONS of cold break in the kettle.

I had two failures-of-concept during the brew, neither of which really had an effect on the resulting beer.  First, I discovered that my cordless drill has neither the torque nor the chuck strength to crank my grain mill with actually grain in the rollers (last night’s test without grain went fine, so go figure).  I was left hand-cranking the 14# of grain through the mill, which was hardly the end of the world.  I’ll save the crappy cordless drill for hanging curtains.

Second, my new-fangled stainless racking system failed again- starting the siphon has proven to be challenging.  I ended up dumping the contents of the kettle into the fermenter (minus a good amount of break, of course).   I’m abandoning this, and will simply use my plastic racking cane and autosiphon to rack from kettle to fermenter.

As an aside, I’m doing some research into the name “Hoppy Gnome” and have come up with some very interesting results.  More on this later.  Read more.

_