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So I quit my job.

What does that have to do with brewing a black IPA? It’s a valid question.

It turns out the dream career of 23 year old me did not turn out to be all that and a bag of chips for 38 year old me. I had a kid. My priorities completely shifted without providing advance notice. And walla here we are. I’m a stay at home dad who ferments things and writes about it from time to time.

None of that information is particularly relevant to brewing a black IPA. More relevant, however, is that on Mondays I drop off my son with a person far more qualified to watch children than I am and work in a production brewery all day. Translated into layman's terms, I wash a ton of dirty kegs and ask millions of annoying questions about brewing beer.

Needless to say, I have quickly learned A LOT about how brewing should work.

I started bringing my home brews in to get feedback and, for some reason, requested brutal honesty. My English Mild was free of off flavors (woot woot), but free of most other flavors too (womp womp). In the end I confessed that I’m not measuring my sparging water at all, just pouring water in until I had 6.5 gallons in the brew kettle...So I diluted the shit out of my wort before it ever had a chance in this world. The feedback, while a little painful, is very fucking useful).

And now we arrive at the black ipa. I brought it in this past Monday. The can almost exploded because I’d over carbonated it, but I already knew that was a problem. We sat around shooting the shit while the foam settled...so for like 2 hours...and then the reviews came in -- ”hey, that’s not bad.” Lukewarm, but AWESOME.

What was notable about this brew session?
* I paid close attention to my mash and sparge water temperature and quantity -- my OG was exactly what it was supposed to be.
* At the end of pouring the correct quantity of water into the mash tun, 6.5 gallons were sitting in the boil kettle.
* I tried some much more complex hop additions (bittering, whirlpool, and dry hop additions) than I have in the past and used one of the nylon hop bags to prevent my wort from becoming a clogged mess.
* I ordered fancy ass yeast from Imperial yeast and stirred it for ~36 hours before adding it to the wort.
* The yeast started working 4 hours after I pitched them...and super vigorously.

What pleasantly surprised me?
* Hitting the exact OG I was aiming for felt amazing.

Why can’t I officially call this my first good batch of beer?
* I think I underpitched my yeast. While my OG was perfect, my FG was too high.
* My dry hopping didn’t work at all. I think it’s because I used the nylon bag for that too.
* I over carbonated like a motherfucker -- I knew I was using too much priming sugar even as I did it. Exploding cans everywhere.
* The flavor profile turning out ok was total blind ass luck. - It’s time to start understanding grain profiles, so I can intelligently build recipes from the ground up.

My new Monday friends asked about my recipe and seemed shamefully disappointed in the fact that I didn’t do any calculations, flavor profiling or...you know….work on my own. I’d just reused some shit on brewers friend -- For the record, I knew I was doing that all along -- but I definitely felt shamed into figuring all of those things out on my own to build a recipe from the ground up for my next brew. I’m going to have help, as you can already tell, so I’m excited about this next one. Very excited.