I got the hot liquor tank water up to infusion temp and starting pouring it into the mash tun.  I made the mistake of slowing pouring the water in as I kept moving the grains to make sure they did not clump.  When I got to my expected 2 gallon in the mash tun, temperature was only 145-150.  I wanted 155, so I started warming the water up quickly and poured more in.  After a 1/2 gallon more water, I had it up to the right temperature.

After about a 1/2hr of mashing, I got my sparge ready.  This is where I had my second mistake, I forgot the hot liquor tank had cooled and I needed to add more.  I had quickly heated it up which delayed sparging by 20 minutes.  When the water was ready I remembered about prepping the grain bed, I poured a few pints back into the top of the mash tun to get the grain bed filtering clean.  I poured a lot more back in than I probably needed to, thinking I wanted the wort clear instead of just free of husks and large particles. Concerned about the tun getting too cool, I started to sparge.  I remembered my friend warning against over sparging and pulling out tannins, so I had that on my mind too.  After the sparge was complete I wasn't sure if I left too much sugar in the mash tun as the spent grains tasted a bit sweet.  Too many concerns.  After the boil and cooling I took my OG and found it was 1.062, which was a 1 above the expected, I switched back to being concerned about tannins.  I needed to remember the rule of "relax, drink a home-brew".

The moment of truth came and the beer was good.  I served this one and the Dark Brown and the Amber was consumed more.  

The recipe, for a 3 gallon batch, added 10 grams of Simcoe and Amarillo hops each at 10 min, 5 mins, and flameout.  The Northern Brewer bittering hops was lowered from 18 to 15 grams as I didn't want to overly bitter the beer.  In hindsight, that was a useless change and is showing me I'm overly concerned about it.

In the end the aroma and flavor of this beer was good.  There was no extra bitterness at all, so no DMS this time.  Many commented it was the best one so far.  The different hops gave it a different citrus and floral characteristic, which was not hard to imagine since my three previous recipes were Citra-based.  But that was the point, to explore a different set of hops.  What I did not achieve was a lot of hop flavor given I doubled the amount of hops.  As the picture on the left shows, there was a lot of hops that made it through the strainer, far more than previous beers.  But I got only a little more flavor.  I either have to dump a lot more flavoring hops, or I need to start dry hopping.  After the Homebrewers conference, it seemed that dry hopping is a standard practice, I guess more than I expected, so maybe I will have to explore that for my next APA/IPA recipe.

This began a back-to-back weekend of brewing.  We had just come north from our 2+ weeks in San Diego, which included attending the Homebrewer's Conference.  I had a new water pump for my chiller system and was ready to go.   During the brew I had a few mistakes along the whole process.

With this batch I agitated the steeping bags a lot to make sure the grains were well soaked.  In the C2 brew, I had dried the grains to give to a friend to use for bread making.  I had found a few small clumps of grains and wanted to avoid a repeat.   Months later with later batches, I realize that technique may be causing me problems with gravity and clarity.

I let it boil over.  For whatever reason, I got distracted by pruning a plant.  With only 3.5 gallons of water, it still climbed over the 8 gallon kettle.  It was all foam, but it was a reminder to not get distracted.  I maintained a mild boil with the lid on, much like with C1, so I felt my water level would be good with less evaporation.

 

The original gravity came out 6pts (0.006) above target.  I scratched my head on that a lot.  This might have been the result of my agitating during the steep too much, but 6pts seemed to high for just that.  I have yet to find a good way to measure how much wort I have after boil, so I could only speculate that the boil over may have taken out more than I thought.

One other thing I did was try to cold crash the beer to settle it before kegging.  Here was were I ran into another problem.  At the time I did not have a second airlock.  So I used the old fashion blowoff tube in a bottle of alcoholic water (half water-half vodka).  I moved the whole setup into the fridge to crashed it and I neglected to check my alcoholic water level.  The next day I saw this layer on the top of the water and the alcoholic water cup tipped over.  I thought the layer was ice, but moving the carboy showed it was liquid.  My guess was during cool down it sucked the liquid into the carboy.  Not knowing the water level in the cup didn't help.   After some discussions with my brewing friend, I siphoned the beer below the layer into the keg and dump the rest.

The beer turned out fine with good in hop flavor.  There was clearly more hop flavor in this APA than the C2 version.  It could have used more, but that could be fixed by the recipe.  What was unexpected was a bitter taste.  I initially thought it had to do with the layer in the carboy, but my friend thought it was DMS.   At this point I had already brewed my follow on batch the same way as this beer, so I was wondering if that beer would suffer the same fate.  Over time the bitterness faded, pointing to a transient issue, not infection, and probably DMS.  The solution to DMS was the boil without a lid.  Since I had always brewed with a lid, I was unsure why I hadn't seen this before, but I guess that's why brewing is hard to repeat.