brewed up a ipa recipe that i came up with myself not a box recipe. grain… 4 lbs carapills, 4 lbs caramel 120, 3.3lbs dme pills malt, 3lbs pail dme, 1lb extra pail dme, 1lb begian candy syrup. hopps 2oz sazz pellet, 3oz cascade pellet, 1 oz citra whole cone, also plan on dry hopping in secondary. question i have is by using pellet hops do i need to rack to secondary sooner than normal to avoid the ‘‘grassy’’ taste? i have heard of people telling me this on certain ipas but usually calling for more hops. this is my first ipa ive done without havin a recipe to go off of so just lookin for some insight and what to do to take my beer to next level.
To your “grassiness” question. NO. That is utter nonsense.
I hope you meant 4oz and not 4 lbs of carapils, and crystal 120.
Get to know the ingredients, this will help you build a recipe with a certain result in mind. Check out what is used in your favorite beers and start playing with those.
Others on this board likely can provide better info than me on the pellet/whole hops issue, but my experiene is that you don’t need to do anything different. Just keep your dry hop time down to <7 days. I think a lot of that grassy flavor comes from too much hop material and/or too long of contact time with the beer.
I would make a few friendly suggestions on your recipe. I think the 4lbs of carapils and 4lbs of caramel 120 are both overkill. Carapils is generally used in small amounts (up to 1lb for 5 gallons) for head retention and some body addition, not as a major grain addition. Four pounds would be a waste, IMO, especially if you are steeping your grains. That much would completely overpower your beer instead of adding a nice flavor/color. Try <1lb this time and if you want more, then step it up in future batches. As repo said, hopefully you meant 4oz of each. Also, I would suggest not mixing the subtle european saaz with the powerful US hops. The saaz will likely get lost. Go with more cascade and/or citra and I think you would be happy there.
I pretty much only use pellets. I don’t dry hop often, but when I do I’ve never noticed grassy flavors. I dry hop in the keg these days, and remove the hops when I like the taste. There’s some what leaves them in the keg until it kicks, though.
On the carapils, I’ve never used more than 1/2 lb in any batch. I don’t think you get much if anything in flavor but it should give some body and help with head retention. 4lbs is crazy talk. Carapils is really not necessary.
I recommend Designing Great Beers (Ray Daniels, I think) if you’re coming up with your own recipes. It’s indispensable, IMO. I don’t recall how much he deals with extract, but as a general rule you can replace 1lb of base malt with 2/3 DME or 3/4 LME.
heh yeah as others have noted 4lbs of those specialty malts would be overkill. Prob just a typo… but if not I would use a lot less. As for the grassiness I agree with the others. Unless you leave the dry hops in there too long you should be fine. I typically only dry hop for 3 days at a time. I would also recommend NOT dry hopping in the primary as the yeast will absorb some of the hop oils and it will be less effective. Get the beer off the majority of the yeast first and then dry hop.
I dry hop with a crapload of hops, both whole and pellet, and I’ve only ever picked up grassiness when I dry hopped with pellets for a very short period of time. What I assume is happening is that the pellets aren’t dropping clear by the time I go to bottle and I’m getting a bit of fine hop material in the finished product.
Right now my SOP is 5-10 days of dry hopping in the primary at cellar temps. I don’t get any off flavors that I can detect with this hopping schedule.
This pretty well sums up my thoughts too. I would add that for me, the <7 day dry hop technique is appropriate for dry hopping with pellets prior to kegging so that they have a chance to settle out and be removed from the finished beer. I really like to dry hop with whole hops in the keg and leave them in throughout service. There is minimal and generally no hop cloudiness, grassiness and wonderful hop aroma.
I tend to dry hop in a fine mesh bag or lately a fine mesh stainless ‘tube’. This prevents having to add time on to ‘wait for particulates to drop out’ I prefer to have my drop hop end when I decide it should. Once that happens (usually about 3-4 days) I will cold crash, fine, or filter the beer.
sorry… oz not lbs. oversight on my part. thanks for the info. try to apply it in next few batches i want to fine tune this in 3 - 4 batches trying diff times and perhaps dif yeist as well.
Successful commercial brewers have reduced the recommended time of dry hopping down to 2-3 days to minimize any off flavors like that vegetal or grassy bite in their IPAs. Combined with first wort bittering hops and hop bursting your aroma hops, my ipas and pale ales come out crisp, perfectly hoppy, and free of off flavors.
Fortunately, I’m a homebrewer, not a commercial brewery. I can do what I want to.
;D I agree Denny. I like the 7 day dry hop just fine !
+2 - I don’t filter or cold crash my IPAs like a commercial brewery so 2-3 days is too short for me. A week to ten days works just fine for me.
I dry hop 5-10 days. It all depends on how lazy I am and if I have clean kegs to fill.
I have a white IPA that I added 3 ounces of pellets to on Christmas Eve but I don’t have any clean kegs. Thinking New Year’s Day is looking good for a cleaning and organization day.
I love the fact that I am not bound by styles and consumers when it comes to my brewing. If I can dream it up, then I can brew it, without consequence. It is that attitude that helps inspire and drive homebrewing as well as commercial brewing everywhere. I am curious though why there seems to be a disconnect from commercial brewing to homebrewing in regards to the brewing process, except where equipment is different. I have found techniques that homebrewers seem to employ that have been discounted or improved upon at the commercial level. My beer has improved because of the changes I have made. I work to make the best possible beer I can, much like everyone else here, but a lot of homebrewers seem resistant to using techniques that make commercial breweries successful and allow them to brew great beer. Is it simply a fear of change? Is it a desire to keep a line between the two?
No desire to keep a line between the two whatsoever. I want to make the best beer humanly possible and am always open to new procedures. For example I have been experimenting with hop stands for a while, in the attempt to approximate what many breweries get from extended whirlpooling. But I don’t have pump (yet) so I improvise with what I have but also rely on what I’ve learned in a couple decades of brewing at home. I also know that some of what larger breweries do revolves around needing to reproduce a recipe consistently -I have no desire to do that.
Okay. That makes sense. Maybe alot of the disconnect I see is from my end, because I work to perfect recipes and rebrew the same ones over and over, aiming for consistency and replecation. Or maybe I am just speaking to the wrong people when it comes to new procedures and techniques. Who knows? Mostly just curious.
Hey, I started doing whirlpools for over 3 years. I make a Cream Ale with all the hops in after flame out and a whirlpool, none in the boil. I’ve done different dry hop times just because - and not all of the successful pros use 3-4 day dry hop times.
I have even been doing batch sparges for some beers, which is not my usual way of mashing. Years back I delved into water chemistry, as the tap water here has high alkalinity. Most in the club don’t do much with water, as they have much better sources of tap water, and I was a bit of a brewing geek for doing that. Now I get a lot of questions from others in the club, and there are even good spreadsheets and a book on water - that has helped even more.
I am pretty open to using a pro techniques if I can do it at home. The engineer in me always wants to refine the process and equipment. For some beers that I have dialed in, I take the if it ain’t broke don’t fix it approach.
It is all about making better beer in our house. Time to put the iPad down now. 
It’s personal experience. I don’t blindly accept anyone’s advice. I try it and decide for myself. That’s not to discount your experience either, but it’s not that there’s a fear of change or any resistance. It’s simply that sometimes the advice from commercial brewers doesn’t hold true in my situation.
+1
The vast differences in scale mean that what holds true for a commercial brewery doesn’t necessarily hold true for the home brewer. We all have to work within the constraints of our own breweries, both homebrewer and commercial brewer alike. I may not have a whirlpool or torpedo, but there are other ways to approximate the same effect in my brewery. What works for them may not work for me. On the other hand, there are things I may be able to pull off that aren’t feasible for a commercial brewery.