Author: Mark Linton

Occasionally, I will try to document a recipe that appears to be popular amongst the Internet brewing community. As well as serving as a reminder of a potential future brew, it also gives me the opportunity to relate interesting points about contemporary brewers and their brewing practices.

Mike “Tasty” McDole recently chatted on The Brewing Network forums about his Tasty APA recipe and included a link to his recipe on Beer du jour. Apparently, through a combination of good luck, skill, friends, and some happy coincidences, Mike ended up taking a good bit of it to GABF ’08 and the crowd loved it.

I can only take credit for the recipe and to a lesser extent the brewing. The beer wouldn’t have been made without the good graces of the 21st Amendment Brewery and Shaun O’Sullivan. And I can’t fail to mention my friend and mentor Jamil Zainasheff who made it all possible by letting me take his ProAm spot at the 21A. I’m very lucky to know these guys.

Mike talked a little about where the recipe came from and what he was going for when he came up with it.

This beer [is] mostly about the malt bill so I recommend going to your stash of hops and coming up with a 33–38 IBU hop bill where one third of the IBUs are between 20 minutes and flameout. The hops I list are for what I call “Pliny Lite” but that’s just because the beer was conceived when I blended 3 oz of my Pliny The Elder clone with 9 oz of my Munich Helles… The goal of this recipe is a dry quaffable beer with IPA level hop flavor from an APA level (lower cost) hop bill. The goal is not a beer you can’t make because you can’t get the hops.

Also, although the beer definitely benefits from dry hopping, you don’t necessarily have to. The late additions should carry over enough and those hops could better be used for another batch.

So mix it up and change the name. Choose your favorite hops and make it your beer.

Mike has an advanced setup and normally uses a hopback for the final boil kettle additions. Here is what he had to say for folks that do not have a hopback available.

Frankly I have no real idea what the hop aroma contribution of the hopback is. On the rare occasion I don’t use it, I don’t notice a particular difference which is probably because I use plenty of dryhop. I use it when making lagers like Helles where I don’t dryhop and I (or judges) can’t perceive any hop nose. I think the prevailing wisdom is that the aroma probably gets scrubbed out during primary fermentation. I’m really just using the hopback as a trub filter and if I want more hop aroma I increase the dry hop.

So to answer the question, the reason I say half as much flameout hops as hopback hops is because I feel that would be the equivalent [amount] of hop aroma due to the better utilization in the kettle versus the hopback. Just my opinion, no science, and I’m certainly open to other ideas.

This beer doesn’t lack for hop flavor so I could also see dropping the hopback/flameout hops altogether.

Since I will not be using a hopback, I have already adjusted the hop schedule in this recipe to move the hopback addition to flameout at half the amount, as Mike suggested. Look at Mike’s original recipe for his version. You might also want to listen to the dry hopping episode of Brew Strong for some tips from Mike on how he gets so much hop character into his beers.

I have formulated this recipe to produce five gallons (19 L) of beer for packaging. I assume a loss due to trub of a half-gallon in the fermenter and another half-gallon in the boil kettle. That leaves six gallons (22.7 L) at the end of the boil. I assume a boil-off rate of about one gallon per hour, which means I need seven gallons (26.5 L) at the start of the boil for a 60-minute full-volume boil. I have adjusted the ingredient amounts accordingly to achieve the desired gravities, bitterness, and pitching rates. I assume the use of bagged pellet hops for all hop additions with the contribution of first wort hops at 35% of normal. I use the Rager formula for calculating bitterness and the Morey model for calculating beer color. I created the extract version of this recipe using Ken Schwartz’s method to convert from all-grain.

Recipe: Mike McDole’s Tasty APA

OG: 1.056 (13.8 °P)
FG: 1.013 (3.3 °P)
ADF: 77%
IBU: 37.9
Color: 6.1 SRM (15.1 EBC)
Boil: 60 minutes
Pre-Boil Volume: 7 gallons (26.5 L)
Pre-Boil Gravity: 1.005 (1.3 °P)

Fermentation and Conditioning

Use 11 grams of properly rehydrated dry yeast, 2 liquid yeast packages, or make an appropriate starter. Ferment at 68 °F (20 °C). When finished, carbonate the beer to approximately 2.5 volumes.

All-Grain Option

Replace the extracts with 8 lbs. (3.63 kg) American two-row, 3 lbs. (1.36 kg) Pilsen, and 0.5 lbs. (0.23 kg) Wheat. Use a single-temperature infusion mash of 60 minutes duration at 154 °F (68 °C). A mashout step is optional. Mash efficiency is assumed to be 70%. Mike uses Mosher’s “Ideal Pale Ale” water profile. Note that there is a typo in the online version of the recipe. The Mg level should be 18 and not 118.

Occasionally, I will try to document a recipe that appears to be popular amongst the Internet brewing community. As well as serving as a reminder of a potential future brew, it also gives me the opportunity to relate interesting points about contemporary brewers and their brewing practices.

This is, of course, the recipe that Mike McDole’s winning entry in the 2007 Samuel Adams® American Homebrew Contest is based on.

Vinnie Cilurzo is credited with developing the first commercial Imperial IPA at Blind Pig Brewery in Temecula, CA. In 1997 he became head brewer at Korbel Champagne Cellars’ Russian River Brewery in Santa Rosa, CA. He worked there for seven years before purchasing the brewery. At the American Homebrewers Association 2004 National Homebrew Competition in Las Vegas, NV, and again at the 2005 National Homebrew Competition in Baltimore, MD, Vinnie passed out a handout containing a homebrew scale recipe of Pliny the Elder which, in turn, got posted at ratebeer.com. Later, he worked with Brew Your Own magazine, to publish the recipe. The differences in the grain bill between the two may be due to different volume assumptions.

The small amount of caramel malt and the moderate dextrine malt are consistent with Vinnie’s tips on making better hoppy beers. Supposedly, Vinnie started introducing Dextrose due to mash tun volume limitations at Blind Pig. He found that his customers preferred the dry finish it provided. Also, they apparently no longer use mash hopping. The cows that eat their spent grains supposedly do not like it. Some say that they have switched to hop extract.

At 1:44:30 into the 06-26-05 episode of The Sunday Session, there is a lecture that Vinnie gave at the 2005 NHC called “Dry Hopping: Quantity, Time, Temperature, and Mixing,” including a discussion of this beer and how it came about and the dry hopping schedule at Russian River.

This is from the product page at Russian River Brewing:

Pliny the Elder was a Roman naturalist, scholar, historian, traveler, officer, and writer. Although not considered his most important work, Pliny and his contemporaries created the botanical name for hops, Lupus salictarius, meaning wolf among scrubs. Hops at that time grew wild among willows, much like a wolf in the forest. Later the current botanical name, Humulus lupulus, was adopted. Pliny died in 79 AD while observing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. He was immortalized by his nephew, Pliny the Younger, who continued his uncle’s legacy by documenting much of what he observed during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

8.0% ABV, 1.071 OG

• Gold Medal, 2006 World Beer Cup (Double IPA Category)
• Gold Medal, 2005 GABF (Double IPA Category)
• Bronze Medal, 2004 GABF (Double IPA Category)

I have formulated this recipe to produce 5 gallons (19 L) of beer for packaging. I assume a loss due to trub of 0.5 gallons in the fermenter and another 0.5 gallons in the boil kettle. That leaves six gallons (22.7 L) at the end of the boil. I assume a boil-off rate of about 1 gallon per hour, which means I need 7.5 gallons (28.4 L) at the start of the boil for a 90-minute full-volume boil. I have adjusted the ingredient amounts accordingly to achieve the desired gravities, bitterness, and pitching rates. I assume the use of bagged pellet hops for all hop additions. I use the Rager formula for calculating bitterness and the Morey model for calculating beer color.

Recipe: Vinnie Cilurzo’s Pliny the Elder

OG: 1.075 (18.2 °P)

FG: 1.013 (3.3 °P)

ADF: 81.8%

IBU: 261.3

Color: 5.9 SRM (14.3 EBC)

Alcohol: 8.4% ABV (6.6% ABW)

Boil: 90 minutes

Pre-Boil Volume: 7.5 gallons (28.4 L)

Pre-Boil Gravity: 1.054 (13.3 °P)

Fermentation and Conditioning

Use 16 grams of properly rehydrated dry yeast, 3 liquid yeast packages, or make an appropriate starter. Ferment at 68 °F (20 °C). When finished, carbonate the beer to approximately 2 to 2.5 volumes.

All-Grain Option

Replace the light extract with 13.3 lbs. (6.0 kg) American two-row malt. Mash at 150–152 °F (66–67 °C). Add 1.5 ounces of 13% AA Chinook hops during the mash.¹

1. To quote Denny Conn, “The difference, to me, is that [first wort hopping] adds hops flavor and smooth bitterness and mash hopping basically does nothing but waste hops.” ↩