Lucknow IPA - Brewing notes

For me, the word Lucknow evokes the drama and bloodshed of the Siege of Lucknow during the Indian Mutiny of 1857. The Occupy! movement around the world has nothing on the Indian Rebellion where the native population of a country took it upon themselves to try and shrug off what amounted to government sponsored corporate control of an entire country and it's occupants. Imagine having your entire country run by a company whose only purpose was tow ring as much wealth out of you and your natural resources to send overseas? To say things were in a bad way is an understatement. This was colonialism at its most unsavory, and it took the brilliance of Gandhi before independence was finally achieved, ninety years later.

Reading the histories of the many wars across Queen Victoria's empire, and the comical recounting by the fictional Harry Flashman, it was the battles of the Indian Rebellion that stood out the most to me, much as did this beer when I was flicking through my book of recipes.

It's an American Indian Pale Ale heavily hopped with Cascade, one of the most popular American varietals. One of the more important reasons for choosing this ale was it gave me an opportunity to use the London Ale yeast I had reclaimed from my Indian Summer Pale Ale (is there a theme here?).

Chinook and Cascade bittering hops

After the sparge (using my homemade mini-mash tun)

The boil

Gravity: 1.062 (Target 1.059)

Yield: 20 litres (target 18.9 litres)

Brew method: Extract with US batch sparging for the specialty grains

Notes: This went surprisingly smoothly and my method of using large ice blocks when topping up the water in the fermenter means I can get down to temperature in about 30 minutes. The yeast starter (using the reclaimed London Ale yeast) hadn't really kicked off when I pitched it so I'm just going to hope that it was reactivated and all will be well. 


*Edit* Twelve hours later and I have a very healthy krausen forming on top of my wort. Looks like the yeast survived!

My only frustrations today was finding out that the Brew shop had left off 3 kg of light malt extract from my order so I was unable to put the Ginger ale on as planned.


*Edit* 6 Days later, fermenting activity has subsided so I'm now moving onto the dry hopping stage. This will add extra hop flavour and whole lot of hop aroma. 
To dry hop, you add the hop pellets to a secondary fermenter and then drain the primary fermenter right into the second. There is no need to worry about contamination at this stage as most of the fermentables (read "food for infections to grow on") have already been converted to alcohol, and the hops have antibacterial properties (hops were originally used in beers as a preservative which is why IPAs are heavily hopped - they required a highly level of hop oil to preserve the liquid for the long voyage on ships from England to the Indian subcontinent where they served to slake the thirst of the colonials).


The beer will stay in the secondary fermenter for 2-3 weeks till it clears further (meaning the sediment will settle out of suspension) and it will then be bottled in the regular way.

transferring the beer to the secondary fermenter