I’m not actually preparing to brew my third batch, but I have been brainstorming (as has Susan). Being one of my favorite styles, I kind of want to brew an IPA next. Susan wants me to wait until it’s closer to summer (and for other reasons, again, can’t publicly disclose them). Instead, she wants me to make a dark wheat ale, similar to Schlafly No. 15, which is an excellent beer, by the way.
I’ve been playing around with Beer Calculus at hopville.com to come up with recipes. It’s my first time tooling around to make up my own recipe, not knowing much about the different types of malts and grains out there, but knowing enough about hops (lots of info about the different varieties) and about yeast (good info from White Labs). The good thing about that site is it helps guide you with the target OG and IBU for the beer. It also gives you an idea of the color and how bitter or sweet it will be.
Anyway, I made up a recipe for an English IPA and for a dark wheat ale. Here’s what I got for the recipes. I’d link to them, but I haven’t made them public as I’m likely going to be messing around with them and won’t actually be brewing what I put together on there. Feel free to critique, so long as you have explanations (since I know little to nothing about recipe creation).
English IPA
3.3# Amber LME
3# Pale DME
0.5# British Pale Two-row
0.25# Crystal 10L
0.25# Caramel 30L
Steep grains until water boils. Add extract, return to boil.
60 min 2 oz Fuggles and 2 oz East Kent Goldings (both pellets)
Pitch White Labs California Ale Yeast
1 week in primary, 2 weeks in secondary, dry hopping with 3 oz whole leaf Willamette for final 7 days.
Dark Wheat Ale
3.3# Dark LME
3# Light DME
0.5# American Crystal 120L
0.25# Caramel Wheat Malt
0.25# German Dark Wheat Malt
Steep grains until water boils. Add extract, return to boil.
60 min 1 oz Cascade pellets
30 min 1 oz Cascade pellets
Pitch White Labs California Ale Yeast
1 week in primary, 2 weeks in secondary.
I know I’ve said this before so I’m sure you’re tired of hearing about it. But, don’t boil your grains. You don’t want them to get above about 170°F.
For your IPA, I would recommend at least an ounce of hops at 15-20 min and 0 min, in addition to dry hopping. You want it to be hoppy, right? (but not overly hoppy)? Your IPA OG looks a little low too, though I haven’t done any calcs. Maybe you could use 7-8 lb of light DME instead of 3.3LME/3DME? Also, you might consider using an english yeast. I use WLP002 a lot, it’s good and will give you more of an English ester profile, the CalAle is almost too clean for an English IPA. Ferment at around 68°F if you can control it.
Your wheat ale looks fine, but there’s not that much wheat in there that you can get out without mashing. I believe there are some wheat-based LME/DME products out there, you might want to consider using one of those.
Have you ever heard of Promash or Beersmith? I’ve used both of them, I personally like Beersmith better but they’re both good programs. They both have trial versions that you can use for free (limited functionality, or 30 days full, I forget), and they’re both something like $20 to buy. Well worth it, in my opinion. They make it very easy to play around with recipes, targetting your OG, IBUs, color, batch sizes, different hops grains yeasts waters, etc.
If you continue brewing, which it sounds like you’ve “caught the bug”, you will probably eventually want to get one of these programs. Again, they’re both good (and I believe there are a couple other decent programs out there too), I would recommend you try the trial versions of both and buy whatever you like best.
^Pretty much what he said. But, it boils down to this:
1. You need additional rounds of hops, particularly finishing hops, in your IPA. And, the gravity is a little low.
2. Not enough wheat in your wheat!