Wildcard - Caffeinated Double IPA
(Brewed January 2010)
The concept was to create a heavily caffeinated beer as a classy alternative to the particularly foul tasting alcoholic energy drinks so popular around college campuses and hipster hangouts these days (Four Loko, JOOSE, etc). Dedicated to Charlie "Wildcard" Kelly, since no one could better appreciate the tasty synergy of America's favorite upper and downer than him.
Watch out though, at 7.5% abv and 150mg caffeine, it has a tendency to cut your mental brake lines.
Since caffeine tends to have a mildly bitter/astringent taste, I figured using a highly hopped IPA/DIPA as the base would mask it best. I focused on a simple malt bill with enough high-alpha American hop additions to put it in Double IPA territory in bitterness (recipe at the bottom). I split the batch at bottling and caffeinated a couple gallons up to 150mg per 12oz, and it was almost impossible to taste a difference between the two. As a frame of reference, a typical cup of drip coffee is between 120-160mg.
"How do you get the caffeine in the beer?" is everyone's first question (after, "Did you eat a lot of paint chips when you were a kid?"). Well, its tricky; the effective dose of caffeine is physically really small, so while you can purchase pure caffeine powder (google it), the difficulty comes into accurately measuring and distributing these tiny amounts into the beer equally. What happens if the powder clumps and sinks to the bottom, and you get a bottle with 500 or 1000mg? You're not going to be in any real danger from overdoing it, but it would give you a terrible headache and keep you up all night. I used NoDoz pills to accurately measure it out since they come in increments of 200mg. There's another problem there though; the pills are made up of about 10% caffeine and 90% chalky, bitter adjunct that you definitely don't want in there. So here's what I came up with:
Procedure -
1. Finely crush NoDoz pills (200mg caffeine each) using mortar and pestle.
2. Mix with small amount of pure ethanol (I used Everclear). Caffeine will dissolve into ethanol in a few minutes, while the chalky adjunct materials will fall out.
3. Use eyedropper to pull off the caffeinated tincture without disturbing chalky sediment. Add to bottling bucket as you begin racking the beer.
This way you get the caffeine measured accurately, purified, diluted and dissolved into solution, so you can be sure that as you fill the bottling bucket you get even mixing. Based on the number of NoDoz pills and the amount of ethanol used, I calculated that each of the 12oz bottles got about 150mg and their abv was boosted about half a percent.
Alpha Dog was left non-caffeinated, while Wildcard got the special treatment. They both turned out as delicious examples of a seriously hoppy West Coast DIPA - think Stone Ruination, Pizza Port Wipeout, or Ballast Point Sculpin.
Date: 1/26/2010
Size: 5.4 gal
Original Gravity: 1.066
Terminal Gravity: 1.013
Color: 11 SRM
Alcohol: 7.0 / 7.5% (Wildcard)
Bitterness: 131 IBU by Rager formula. By my tastebuds, it's more like 90-100
Ingredients:
7.1 lb Pale Liquid Malt Extract
1.5 lb Dry Extra Light Extract
12 oz Corn Sugar
12 oz Cara-Pils
4 oz Crystal Malt 40°L
1.25 oz Columbus (14.0%) - added during boil, boiled 75.0 min
1.0 oz Columbus (14.0%) - added during boil, boiled 60.0 min
0.5 oz Simcoe (13.0%) - added during boil, boiled 25.0 min
0.5 oz Amarillo (8.5%) - added during boil, boiled 25.0 min
0.5 oz Simcoe (13.0%) - added during boil, boiled 10.0 min
0.5 oz Amarillo (8.5%) - added during boil, boiled 10.0 min
0.5 oz Simcoe (13.0%) - added during boil, boiled 1.0 min
0.5 oz Amarillo (8.5%) - added during boil, boiled 1.0 min
0.5 oz Centennial (10.0%) - added during boil, boiled 1.0 min
1.0 oz Columbus (14.0%) - added dry to secondary fermenter
1.0 oz Centennial (10.0%) - added dry to secondary fermenter
0.5 oz Simcoe (13.0%) - added dry to secondary fermenter
0.5 oz Amarillo (8.5%) - added dry to secondary fermenter
750ml Yeast Starter of Safale US-05 (or WLP001 Cali Ale / Wyeast 1056 American Ale)
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