What this is
A hazy pitched at the tangerine and stone-fruit end rather than the usual citrus-and-dank default. Luminosa, Mandarina Bavaria and Alora carry the fruit, a Citra and Mosaic cryo charge supplies the backbone, and Columbus is restricted to bittering so the resin sits underneath rather than beside it.
Target is 1.062 to 1.015 for 6.1%. The finishing gravity is deliberately high: mash at the top of the range, 20% oats between the two forms, and a grist that is 35% wheat and oats altogether.
A Whirlfloc tablet does go in at 15 minutes, which looks like a contradiction in a beer built for haze and isn’t. Carrageenan drops coarse hot-break protein; NEIPA haze is a finer protein-polyphenol colloid that a kettle tablet does not touch. What it buys is less trub into the fermenter, which points the same way as the chloride-forward water — against the harshness that has turned up in previous attempts.
Built around the yeast
Every decision on the hot side exists to feed LalBrew Pomona’s thiol activity.
The whirlpool runs at 74°C rather than the usual 80°C, held for 30 minutes. The temperature is the load-bearing number: 74°C is the top of the low-utilisation band, so it halves isomerisation and preserves more bound thiol precursor for the yeast to convert. The extra ten minutes over a standard stand buys more oil and precursor extraction at a much smaller bitterness cost than raising the temperature would. Discipline matters more than duration here — hold 74°C rather than starting hot and drifting down. Alora is the key addition, at roughly five times the bound 3MH of Cascade.
The dip hop is the other half of it. Around 2.5 L of wort is pulled at 75°C before the main whirlpool starts, steeped with Krush and Mandarina Bavaria for 30 minutes, chilled, and poured into the fermenter hops and all at pitch. It replaces the conventional day-two in-fermenter charge, and it is the one genuinely new technique in this recipe.
Three reasons it beats a day-two dose: Pomona is fast and reaches terminal around day four, so a day-two charge risks colliding with the dry hop trigger; the hops get the whole fermentation of yeast contact rather than the back half; and it removes a fermenter opening, which matters more than it sounds when oxygen at dry hop is the highest-risk moment in a hazy.
Water is chloride-forward at roughly 2:1, a deliberate departure from the sulfate-heavy habit. Carrying gypsum-heavy water into a heavily dry-hopped hazy is the likeliest explanation for harshness in previous attempts.
The Galaxy oil
The beer takes its name from Galaxy Quantum Brite, an Abstrax hop oil dosed at the keg. It is a component of the hop bill rather than an experiment bolted onto the end: Galaxy brings passionfruit and peach that sit squarely on the target axis but is absent from the pellet schedule, and dosing after packaging means it arrives at full strength instead of being partly scrubbed out by fermentation CO₂.
5 mL — the full vial — into 23 L works out at 0.86 oz/bbl, near the top of the Abstrax recommendation of 0.3–1.0. The aroma contribution is roughly equivalent to 154 g of T-90 pellets.
It is a water-soluble emulsion rather than a neat oil, so it disperses on contact with no warming or rolling, and it contributes zero bitterness — the alpha acids are removed in processing. Dose into the purged keg before transfer and carbonate.
Notes before brewing
Grist. Flaked adjunct is held to 8% by using malted wheat in place of flaked and Big O in place of most of the flaked oats. Both malted forms bring husk, so the bed stays permeable. A compacted adjunct bed both tanks efficiency and converts poorly, and is a plausible shared cause behind past hazies underperforming.
Water volumes. Corrected after the first brew. Strike is 25.0 L, not the 25.5 originally written: the extra half litre was there to cover Big O absorbing more than flaked oats, and the absorption assumption turned out to be too generous in the other direction. Pre-boil is listed at 29 L as a design figure, but that brew measured 33 — only about 0.55 L/kg of absorption and dead space across a 7.3 kg grist, where 29 implies nearer 1.1. Expect the higher figure and either cut sparge water to about 8 L or plan for a longer boil. Take the pre-boil gravity: with the volume model unsettled it is the only early read on efficiency, and it is the measurement that got skipped.
Bitterness. The 73 IBU figure includes the whirlpool and the dip hop, which contributes around 18 on its own as the pulled wort cools. Perceived bitterness will read well below that — sub-boiling additions are softer than the model suggests, and 140 g of cryo dry hop pulls iso-alpha-acids back out of solution.
Pressure. Cap at 5 PSI through active fermentation. The standard ramp to 15 suppresses esters, and in a hazy the esters are half the point.
Vessel. Prefer the 60 L All Rounder. 24 L plus 80 g of dip hops in a 30 L vessel leaves about 6 L of headspace against a vigorous Pomona krausen.
Dry hop trigger is terminal and flat for 12 hours, not the usual 1.017 gravity trigger — at this OG and FG, 1.017 is already 96% attenuation. Hold three days at 20°C on the hops before crashing.
Unverified
Citra Cryo and Mosaic Cryo alphas are estimated at roughly double the T-90 mid-range. Check them against the packets before calculating anything that matters.