I set myself the challenge of only using ingredients I have in, mainly because I’m skint, to make a tasty brew.

Since I still have an abundance of hops in I went for the obvious – an IPA. I still have enough Maris Otter left for a couple of brews but I also had a small amount of Caramalt too, so that went on the list, and the only suitable yeast left was some Safale US-05 which should give me a clean and crisp US-style IPA. The thing that makes it not a US-style IPA is that all my hops are British, but I wanted to pick ones that would give it a bit of an edge even without having something like Cascade in there. Here’s the brew sheet:

Malt

• 1kg Maris Otter
• 200g British Caramalt

Hop Schedule

Yeast

• Safale US-05

I had a bit of a temperature drop during the mash so had to apply some heat. Considering I just place a tea towel over my stock pot during the mash I’m amazed it doesn’t loose more, but it went OK. I had to shoot off partway through so ended up with a 1h 45min mash.

Unfortunately I only had my inaccurate analogue scales so all the hop measurements are rough – those listed above are what I was aiming for but mostly they were probably above that; I was accurate to about 5g.

Once the boil was over, wort was cooled (with a brief stint outside on a lovely winter’s day to hurry the process) and transferred to the demijohn I ended up with an OG of 1.070. It was supposed to be 10.62 so there’s a bit of a difference there, but I’m not really set up for liquoring back so I left it as it was. I’m still hoping for an FG of 1.009 which will give me an estimated ABV of 8%, if the FG finishes as high as the difference in the OG (around 1.017) I’ll be looking at my original estimated ABV of 7%.

It has been 11 days since brew day, if I can find the time this weekend I would like to dry hop it with Boadicea and Bramling Cross, leave it for a few days then bottle and leave for a few weeks to condition.

Here are some pictures of the brew (sorry, I forgot to take a pic of the demijohn).