Sloppy Seconds IPA

Sloppy Seconds IPA

My freezer is full of leftover hops from past brew sessions.  Maybe it's because of the hop shortage from a few years ago, or my own frugality, or a combination of the two, but I couldn't bring myself to throw them out.  So today I'm doing a fun brew that will hopefully turn out well and likely be hard to replicate given the varying ages of the hops.  Because of all the leftover hops and the fact that I'm re-using yeast from our Big Brew event, I decided to go with Sloppy Seconds IPA for the name, (couldn't help it, my inner 14 year old thought it was funny).

The intent is for this to be a hop-focused west coast style IPA with as much hop flavor/aroma as these tired little hops can muster.  I'm also using some homegrown hops in my hopback to try to squeeze out a little more flavor/aroma. 

You'll notice all hop additions occur from the 30 minute mark on, which should give a nice smooth bitterness while emphasizing flavor/aroma.  Now I say should because some of these hops have been in my freezer for a while, so I'm sure they've lost some flavor/aroma over time.  I don't know how old some of these hops are so this brew is a little bit of a gamble.  

One important note, I smelled all the hops first to make sure they hadn't gone cheesy, picked up odors from the freezer, or anything else that would detract from the finished product.  I didn't detect any problems other than some of the really old ones had completely lost their aroma (I'm not using them).  Here's the recipe as I'm making it.

Recipe

11.50 # Briess Pale 2 row

 1.00 # Briess Crystal 20L  

 0.75 # Briess Light Munich  

 0.75 # Briess Carapils  

 0.25 # Crisp Torrified Wheat  

 0.6 oz CTZ 30 min

 0.5 oz Chinook 30 min

 0.2 oz Simcoe 30 min

 2.4 oz Goldings, East Kent 15 min

 0.6 oz Cascade 15 min

 1.4 oz Liberty 5 min

 0.4 oz Fuggles 5 min

 5.2 pH Stabilizer

 Whirfloc

 WLP001 California Ale
3.0 oz Citra (hopback)

Mash at 153F for 60min.

90 minute boil
Ferment at 69F

Brewing Notes:
The brew day was fairly uneventful...no boil overs this time!  The only challenge was I opened a couple bags of homegrown hops and wasn't real thrilled with the aroma so I had my wife run to Salt City Brewing and pick up three ounces of Citra leaf hops for the hopback.

Update:
This IPA turned out very well.  It doesn't have quite as much hop flavor/aroma as I was hoping for, but it's a really good IPA in my opinion.  The Citra in the hop back seems to have contributed more aroma than flavor and the blend of the leftover hops give it a nice smooth bitterness.  I think I'll do this again with fresher hops and may even move the first additions back to the 20 or 15 minute mark.