NZ Hoppy Red Ale

About This Beer

Robin’s fifth batch, and the first time he has revisited one of his own recipes rather than designing from scratch. He liked the malt-led red from July and wanted a version that was hoppier and more tropical.

Malt proportions deliberately unchanged, so it stays recognisably the same beer. Everything supporting the hops is different: cleaner base malt, lower mash, sulfate-forward water, a thiol-active yeast, and an NZ tropical hop bill built on Nectaron. Reasoning on the recipe page.

Brew day

Brewed 14 August 2026. Pre-boil gravity taken for the first time, and it settled the efficiency question: 88% on a straight malt grist.

The 78% carried until now had been back-solved from the July red, whose OG was read on day two with fermentation already running. Read OG on brew day or every number downstream inherits the error. On an adjunct-heavy grist the figure is a different one entirely, as Fusion Haze showed at 67%. Efficiency is a property of the grist.

Mash ran thirty minutes at 67°C before coming down to 65°C, probably part of why it ran high.

Fermentation

Two packets of Pomona at around 20°C, away inside twelve hours. Friday evening pitch well underway by Saturday morning.

Dry hop 7pm Sunday 16 August, day two, one charge of Nectaron and Riwaka. The timing is the point of the whole schedule: Pomona converts Nectaron’s geraniol into β-citronellol while actively fermenting, so the hops have to be in during primary. At terminal it is a conventional dry hop instead.

Second job for the same charge. Hops release fermentable sugar out of the dextrins, and this was going into 750 ml flip-tops, so better that active yeast eats it in the fermenter than that it turns up behind a swing-top.

Attenuation came in well above the July red’s Nottingham on a nearly identical specialty fraction. Two things drive it: Pomona handles an 18.4% specialty grist better than a straight strain swap suggests, and a day-two dry hop with the yeast in full flight releases sugar the yeast then eats. The 67°C half hour cost less than expected, worth remembering before chasing dryness harder next time.

Bitterness-to-gravity lands at 0.85, enough to cut a malt-led grist without reading as a Red IPA pretending to be balanced.

Bottled

Twenty-one litres into 750 ml flip-tops on Wednesday 26 August, sugar primed. Two litres left behind in trub, yeast and spent hop, a good result out of a bucket with no cone.

Still unrecorded: where the fermenter went once it was running, and what temperature it reached. Pomona’s stone fruit lives at the top of its range, so that decides how expressive this ends up.

Water

Brooklyn household tap, the same supply as Robin’s four previous brews, rather than the Petone artesian tap the salt additions were calculated from. The salts dominate the baseline by an order of magnitude, so the shift is small enough to ignore.

Mash pH not measured and no acid into the mash; sparge acidified as usual. Four batches now without a mash reading, and it remains the most useful measurement not being taken.

No campden, on chlorinated reticulated water. No plaster or TCP fault across any of Robin’s batches, so the residual is evidently low, but it rises after mains flushing, reservoir work and heavy rain. Half a tablet in 35 litres is the cheapest unclaimed improvement on this system.