Creating an Awarding-winning American IPA

Steve Bischoff of Root Down Brewing Co. (Phoenixville, Pennsylvania) talks about what went into creating Bine, his gold medal–winning American IPA.

“The American IPA has always been my favorite style. I wanted to make a sessionable IPA without it being a session IPA. That’s what I always worked on as a homebrewer. There’s no crystal malt in the recipe. I use dextrose to thin it out, and I concentrate a lot on how I use my hops and where I use my hops. I don’t just overload them and say more is better.

I do a small bittering addition because you want to have some in the boil in the beginning, but I don’t want to develop all my bitterness at that point. So I work backward.

I figure out my aroma additions and then how many more IBUS I need and make that up in the bittering addition. I’m sure a lot of people do the same thing. But the varieties that you use make a difference as well. For some, I don’t like the bitterness they offer, so those are zero-minute or whirlpool additions. I’ve played around with different timings and settled on seven. I just like 7 minutes, and it works for me.

For Bine, we use Warrior for bittering. It’s a very clean bittering hop and doesn’t have an overly resinous or grassy character. Then there’s Centennial, Mosaic, Amarillo, and Citra. They are great hops, and you get huge aromas from them.

I use gypsum for the American IPA. We have a good water source, so why mess with it unless you need to? We just run it through our carbon filter and then it’s just standard dry yeast, Chico.”