Mean WCIPA

About This Beer

A homebrew-scale version of a West Coast IPA brewed collaboratively by James W. and Dean Moses, head brewer at Mean Doses in Wellington.

The Valley Brewers club ran a Beat the Brewer competition: Dean provided his Red IPA recipe and members each brewed a batch. James won the judging and earned the right to brew a full commercial batch with Dean at Mean Doses. That collaboration produced a 500 L West Coast IPA which took first place in a Wellington commercial West Coast IPA challenge. This is that beer scaled down.

Built on a highly fermentable lager malt base, which lets the hops dominate, with Ale malt for body and light biscuit, Munich for depth without sweetness, and a little Supernova for a subtle caramel note and the pale golden-orange colour.

The cryo substitution

James’s original uses standard Mosaic pellets in both dry hops. Substituted here for Mosaic Cryo at half the quantity, to account for cryo carrying roughly double the lupulin concentration of standard pellets. Columbus and Simcoe kept at their original amounts.

Fermentation

Two packets of Pomona dry pitched, primary at 18.5°C under spunding with pressure allowed to build gradually.

First dry hop at 48 hours on a gravity trigger, as a biotransformation addition. Temperature then ramped a degree at a time over days 2 to 4 for a diacetyl rest, with the second and much larger dry hop going in at the top of that ramp for three to four days of contact. Pressure reached 15 to 20 psi during spunding, roughly half-carbonated before the crash.

The lager malt base ran more fermentable than the strain’s calibrated figure suggests, finishing at about 90% apparent attenuation.

Crash began Sunday 3 May, ramped down over five days to 3°C, held 48 hours, kegged 7 May.

Packaging

Into a 19 L keg. The large dry hop load plus trub cut the packaged volume noticeably. Carbonation was partly built during spunding, then topped up with CO₂ to about 2.4 volumes.