Wednesday 15 March 2023

Let's Brew Wednesday - 1898 Cairnes I.P. Ale

I promised you lots of regional IPAs. Today there's the special treat of an Irish IPA.

Lying at the top of Cairnes’ Pale Ale pile was I.P. Ale. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say that surely stands for India Pale Ale. Irish IPA, then. Weirdly, I can find it in any style guidelines. Who knows if it’s true to style or not.

In terms of gravity, it looks similar to a Burton IPA. Though the hopping is much more restrained. More similar to that of the weaker London type. Just brewed in a much smaller volume. A mere 60 barrels, in this case. While even a modestly-sized brewer in the capital, such as Fullers, churned out 200 barrels at a time.

Pale Ales of this period usually had pretty simple grists. Often a combination pale malt and sugar or just all pale malt. Cairnes opted for the former. They’ve also gone for the very vague description of “Sacc.”. But, at the very far right of the record, the actual sugars are scribbled in: 4 cwt of No. 2, 1 cwt of No. 3 and 6 lbs of No. 1.

The base malt was 75% from Irish barley, 25% from Chilean. One of the favourite foreign sources.

Both types of hops were English, one from the 1897 and the other from the 1898 harvest.

I’ve lowered the FG to account for secondary conditioning. The racking gravity recorded in the log was 1023º. I’d guess this would have had at least 12 months secondary conditioning in hogsheads. 

1898 Cairnes I.P. Ale
pale malt 12.25 lb 89.09%
No. 2 invert sugar 1.25 lb 9.09%
No. 3 invert sugar 0.25 lb 1.82%
Goldings 120 mins 2.00 oz
Goldings 60 mins 2.00 oz
Goldings 30 mins 2.00 oz
Goldings dry hops 1.00 oz
OG 1064
FG 1018
ABV 6.09
Apparent attenuation 71.88%
IBU 72
SRM 9
Mash at 152º F
Sparge at 165º F
Boil time 120 minutes
pitching temp 60º F
Yeast Wyeast 1084 Irish ale

 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Shame Cairnes died if it was still around it would be Ireland’s Timothy Taylor.