21B Specialty IPA: Red IPA

Fresh Hop Red IPA

The red IPA grain bill run against 450 g of wet hops. Brewable for about three weeks a year.

Recipe by Matt Paterson Brewed 1 time Matt Paterson

Forked from West Coast Red IPA

Brew day sheet → Open in compare →

What this is

The West Coast Red IPA grain bill, unchanged, run against roughly 450 g of wet hops picked the same day. It exists as its own recipe because you cannot reach it by substituting a variable: the hop schedule is different, the volumes are several times larger, and it is brewable for about three weeks a year when the New Zealand harvest is on.

Lower gravity than the canonical at 1.051, and it finishes very dry at 1.005 for 6.0%.

Working with wet hops

The 337 g of Tangerine Dream and 109 g of Riwaka are whole-cone weights, not pellet equivalents. Wet hops carry most of their mass as water, so the gram figures look alarming next to a pellet schedule and deliver far less bitterness and aroma per gram. Do not scale a pellet recipe by weight.

Both go in at 5 minutes. That is late enough to keep the volatile aroma and early enough to get some extraction, and it keeps the whole load out of the whirlpool where the bed would be unmanageable.

Bittering is a single 25 g charge of Pacific Jade at 60 minutes, deliberately kept small and clean so the wet hops are not competing with pellet bitterness.

What it gave back

This brew was a fork, but two of its decisions became permanent in the parent recipe.

Pacific Jade took the bittering slot from Mosaic and stayed there. And Krush, brought in on the cold side to give the beer some structure once the wet hop aroma faded, worked well enough that it became the lead hop of the canonical recipe two months later. Neither was the point of the experiment.

Timing

Order wet hops against a pick date, not a brew date, and build the brew day around whenever they actually arrive. Everything upstream of the 5-minute addition is the standard red IPA process, so the mash and boil can be planned normally.

Specification

Brewed once with no departures from the specification below: 2026-03-22. A lineage table appears here once a brew diverges from the recipe.

Vital statistics
OG
1.051
FG
1.005
ABV
6.0%
Batch
24 L single
Total grist
6.4 kg
Total hops
621 g 25.9 g/L
Fermentables kg
Gladfield American Ale Malt
4.2 kg 65.6% of grist
Gladfield Vienna Malt
1.0 kg 15.6% of grist
Gladfield Aurora Malt
0.4 kg 6.3% of grist
Gladfield Shepherds Delight Malt
0.4 kg 6.3% of grist
Gladfield Toffee Malt
0.3 kg 4.7% of grist
Gladfield Eclipse Wheat Malt
0.1 kg 1.6% of grist
Hops grams · stage split
Pacific Jade
25 g 25 b
Tangerine Dream
337 g 337 b
Riwaka
109 g 109 b
Krush
150 g 25 b · 25 wp · 100 dh
Yeast
LalBrew Pomona
Pitched
Adjuncts & extracts
Whirlfloc
1 g 10 min
Yeast Nutrient
4 g 10 min