Not long ago we got contacted by Echo View Farms about testing out their Homegrown IPA all grain homebrew kit. I brewed up this ten gallon batch and split the wort into two fermentors so I could pitch two yeasts. This weeks video, we give the finish product a taste.

The most exciting part of this recipe is the collaboration Echo View Farms has with Riverbend Malt House. The base malt and one of the flavor malts (Heritage Malt) are both 6-row based. Most often you find craft and homebrew beer makers using 2-row varieties. I certainly haven’t brewed with 6-row that I can remember so we were thrilled to get a chance.

The brew session went OK. I came up a little shy on the original gravity according to the recipe’s predictions. I was 1.050 vs. the 1.058 target. I suspect this is due to the crush on the malt. Not a big deal as normally I think many brewers doing all grain would likely order a recipe uncrushed and crush it just before brewing.

Second, issue was that the Cascade hops in the recipe we a bit dark in color. Little brown and still somewhat wet feeling. Now that may or not have been an issue, as maybe these cascades from North Carolina were just extra resiny or had a lot of oils. But the drying of these hops did seem a little suspect.

(Both of these issues were also noted my Michael Tonsmeire of The Mad Fermenationist Blog)

That said, the beer certainly didn’t seem to suffer much from these potential issues. I found that the malt profile was fairly rich for an IPA. The flavor from the Chinook Hops was pretty prevalent, piney and resiny. Overall, I think the beer was pretty well balanced more as an American Pale Ale rather than an IPA. A big charge of chinook and cascade as a dry hop would go pretty far to getting more IPA like. While maybe pulling back on the chocolate malt and heritage a bit. Its hard to say how these malts all played well together not knowing what the base malt tastes like on its own.

Overall, we really enjoyed the experience and the opportunity. The beer is very drinkable and is an excellent jumping off point for experimentation. Maybe dry hopping with some Amarillo and Citra would be pretty interesting.

So if you are interested in seeing what happening in North Carolina with malts and hops check these guys out. Order some hops or some malt and you’ll be rewarded. The bag that our malt came in also had a label for some Rye Malt (not in this recipe). I’d love to maybe get a hold of some of that stuff and see how it performs.

Thanks again to the good folks in North Carolina for letting us try out their wares.

BREW ON!