Recipe and Brewday here.
After about 3 weeks of carbonation, I opened a bottle of the Amber Wheat IPA just before a London derby in the EPL. The London derby was fiery but I will stick to reviewing the beer in this post.
This IPA pours a proper thick head, much like a head every brewer dreams of for all his beers. The head sticks around all the way to the end of the glass and then some. The pour is a beautiful dark amber and it is slightly darker than what I expected. It seemed to me like I took a bottle from one of my extract batches.
This is a medium bodied beer with pines and resins on the nose. Surprisingly, the aroma is less citrus even though there was a fair amount of Cascade and Simcoe in the dry hop. Although this was fermented with WB-06, there are no clove or banana notes on the nose and it wasn’t intended either. It was intentionally fermented at a slightly higher temperature to avoid the lighter aromas that WB-06 would have in a wheat ale.
This is not a perfect IPA because the aroma is not as intense as I would like it to be, but it does fit other characteristics of an IPA fairly well. I do not have a tolerance towards highly bitter brews and this beer was brewed with just 40 IBUs and the 40 IBUs definitely show: it is a clean bitterness and does not overpower the beer at all.
The beer finishes crisp on the palate, it is slightly sweet but very drinkable with no overpowering characteristic. If I brew this beer again, and there are very good chances I will, I will tweak it to have a more hoppy nose and a less amber color, and that’s about all the changes I would want in it.
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