Many of my brewing ideas come from trying a great commercial beer and wanting to replicate its flavors at home. Today’s subject is Sapwood’s The Dragon which used a hop blend that I had never tried before: Mosaic, Nelson Sauvin, and Hallertau Blanc.

Both Nelson Sauvin and Hallertau Blanc are typically described as having wine-like qualities. Nelson Sauvin in particular has a reputation for being very unique, and a bit polarizing. I thought The Dragon was delicious though, so I guess I might be a fan.

This won’t be a clone, just a recipe inspired by the hop blend from the original.

This is batch number two of my IPA experiment series. In the first batch I tested out some new equipment and techniques. The beers were some of the best IPAs I’ve ever made, but they were very hard to tell apart. It felt like I had one beer taking up two taps.

Maybe a bad sign for my motivation for testing small tweaks, but for this round I feel like having a litte fun and brewing two significantly different IPAs just to compare the hop blends.

I have ideas of what hops I like, but it’ll be nice to have two equally fresh beers to taste at the same time.

One of my brewing goals for 2020 is to improve the quality of my IPAs. I feel like this far into the brewing game, I should have a little more to show for it when I make my favorite style. They’re rarely bad, but they don’t wow as often as I’d like.

To that end I’m going to be doing a series of experiments this year where make two similar beers at the same time, with just one variable changed. I hope this will improve my process, one tweak at at time.

For this brew, I’m trying out some new hardware and techniques that I’ll use for the rest of my upcoming experiments.