Muntons Hazy IPA

The Hazy IPA kit from Muntons is frequently praised as being the best beer kit home-brewers have used. It is a New England style Hazy IPA that “will produce strong citrus and grapefruit notes with tropical and stone fruit flavours”. The description sounds delicious and is on-trend with popular craft beers that the cool kids are drinking.

This is a 2-can kit, totalling 3kg of pre-hopped malt extract and comes with two packets of hop pellets: 56g of Citra and 60g of Mosaic. It also comes with a packet of Fermentis S-04 yeast. The kit makes up to 20 litres of beer, rather than the 23 litres that is standard with most other kits.

Brewing the Beer

The box comes with everything included – no extra sugar or malt extract required. I brewed the beer to the instructions: warm up the cans of wort, tip them into a sanitised fermentation bucket, add some boiling water (and rinse out the cans at the same time) and top up with cold water.

I pre-treated 23 litres of tap-water in another sanitised fermentation bucket, adding half a crushed Campden tablet, and let it sit for about 15 minutes.

I ensured the cold water was poured from a reasonable height, to aerate the wort, and I mixed it thoroughly. I took an initial gravity reading of 1.046. The fermentation bucket was then put in the garage, wrapped in some old blankets, put on a heat pad set to 20°C and placed in a make-shift box out of old insulation sheets.

The yeast was pitched and I put the lid on.

Unfortunately, due to the cold weather, the temperature did not stay at a constant 20°C but dropped quite low on several occasions. This didn’t seem to affect the fermentation too much – it still “hit all the numbers” on the days that I checked.

Dry Hopping

After 1 day, I added the dry hops: 28g of Citra and 30g of Mosaic.

One day 11, I added the same amount of dry hops again. The smell was incredible, particularly the Citra.

Bottling

On day 11 I poured out a small sample into a trial jar to test the gravity – sitting at 1.006. It tasted delicious!

On day 14 I took another sample – the same gravity, so I knew it was ready to bottle.

I sanitised all my equipment: another fermentation bucket, my bottle wands, bottles, siphon, and the provided “hop sock” filter bag. I put the hop sock over the end of my siphon wand, put it into the fermentation bucket containing the beer, and started siphoning into the clean fermentation bucket. This was a very difficult process! There was so much debris in the beer that the siphon filter quickly became blocked. It took several attempts to clear and restart the siphoning before most of the beer was in the bottling bucket.

If I was to do this beer again, I think I would add the hops into a hop back rather than directly into the wort.

I think I lost a few litres of beer to the debris. There was a decent compacted amount of trub in the bottom of the fermentation bucket, but on top of that was a more liquidy/hoppy mixture that kept clogging the siphon. Eventually I poured this mixture through a sieve with a piece of paper towel on it into a glass and drank it. The uncarbonated beer was delicious!

The beer was bottled with 2 carbonation drops in each 500ml bottle. I got 36x 500ml bottles in total (18 litres, so I lost 2 litres!), which I’ll keep at room temperature for two weeks to carbonate, and then two weeks in the cold garage to condition.

ABV

The original gravity of the wort was 1.046. The final gravity before bottling was 1.006. The priming sugar could add up to about 0.3% ABV.

So the final ABV can be calculated as:

1.046 – 1.006 = .040 * 131.25 = 5.25% + 0.3% = ~5.5% ABV.

Tasting

Still to come…