Restarting our Ignition

What a difference a year makes.

On the second Monday in January 2015, I drove up to Hayden to create and brew an India red ale recipe with Mad Bomber’s Tom Applegate on his then-makeshift one-barrel operation.

Yesterday, I returned to help make the beer for the first time on the slick seven-barrel system the Bomber installed last spring, the 71st batch brewed on it so far.

Ignition IRA (yes, it’s an Irish car bombings reference) was conceived as an alternative to the caramel malt and citrusy hop character common to the style.

Along with base malt, it uses Munich for richness and black patent for color and a touch of roast. The hops are piney/spicy Chinook, earthy/herbal Nugget and some spicy/floral Crystal for a finishing flourish.

It originally was fermented with a little English ale yeast along with the Bomber’s standard American strain, for a fruity touch. There wasn’t any on hand yesterday, so we went all-American, but bumped up the mash temperature a bit for extra body and sweetness.

While the brew day was again an enjoyable experience, it lacked last year’s drama, the sense that things could fall apart at any minute – like the notoriously unreliable pump that kept shutting down on us. (That was ritually destroyed in the parking lot after the new system arrived, head brewer Alan Longacre confides.)

The brew kettle now creates a rolling boil (pictured above), unlike the previous system’s simmer, and the boil time has been extended by a half-hour to 90 minutes for cleaner, richer flavors. Transferring and cooling the wort for fermentation takes 18 minutes compared to the previous hour and a half.

Less than seven hours after we started, our wort was sitting in a stainless steel, temperature-controlled fermenter (a vast upgrade over the old, primitive plastic ones), waiting for the yeast to do its thing.

The original beer turned out more malty than anticipated, but still rather tasty. (The first batch, anyway; a second batch Applegate attempted on the old system was less successful.)

Since the more efficient new system tends to accent hop character, Applegate says, “I expect it will be more I than RA this time.

“I’m excited to see how it turns out,” he adds. “It should be the difference between a pretty good homebrew batch and a pretty good commercial batch.”

In a few weeks, we’ll find out.