Brewing 3 beers in 3 days was thought to be impossible until we discovered Voss Kveik yeast from Omega Yeast. This is a special yeast from Norway that ferments extremely fast at high temperatures without leaving behind unwanted off-flavors. We made this “3 Day IPA” recipe because we ran out of beer at the office and Kyle, our fearless leader, had friends coming into town for the weekend. Being the guy that owns a homebrewing company, it wouldn’t have been a good look for his friends to visit the office only to see empty taps. In order to fill up some kegs and put beer in our tap lines, we made 3 recipes that would give Kyle 3 IPAs in 3 days. 

A sad day at Clawhammer HQ

This is the second IPA we made as part of our 3 Day IPA series. Here is a link to the first. Here is a link to the third.

Full Brew Day Video

This recipe is for a 5 gallon batch and it is tailored for Clawhammer Supply's 10 gallon 120-volt brewing system, watch us use it in this video.

Yeast Harvesting

Before setting up our equipment to brew this beer, we harvested the yeast from our previous 3 Day IPA, the Azacca Kveik Smash IPA. Since all these beers are fermented in our brewing kettle, we just dumped the remaining yeast and dregs into a jar after our beer was transferred out.

After dumping the leftover yeast and dregs into a jar, we put it in the fridge to preserve it for our next batch

This process of harvesting yeast was really simple and means we won't have to buy more yeast to make our second 3 Day IPA. 

Water

We started this brew day by adding 7.9 gallons (23.85 liters) of Asheville city water to our kettle. We did our water chemistry the exact same way for this beer as we did our previous 3 Day IPA, the Azacca Kveik Smash IPA. In order to give our finished beer a softer mouthfeel and a juicier flavor, we made sure our water had a 2:1 chloride to sulfate ratio. In other words, we made sure there were more chlorides in the water than sulfates.

The water everyone starts with will be different than ours so you’ll need to calculate your own water chemistry. We use Bru’n Water to get our water chemistry right. This is free software that you can download and use alongside software like BeerSmith to make sure you hit all your numbers during a brew day.

Mash

This recipe only uses 11 pounds (5 kilograms) of pale malt. We mashed in at 158° F (70° C).

We waited for our kettle to reach mash temp before mashing in

Mashing in

The weirdest part about our mash is that it only lasted for 25 minutes when a traditional mash would have lasted 60 minutes. Our goal with all three of these 3 Day IPA beers is to finish brewing them as fast as possible so they can be ready to serve as soon as possible. After reading a Brulosophy experiment that compared a Blonde Ale mashed for 60 minutes with another that was mashed for 20 minutes, we thought our 25-minute mash would work out just fine. The Brulosophy mash length experiment showed that only 9 people out of a group of 20 could identify the Blonde Ale that had a shorter mash time. This shows that shorter mash lengths definitely won't be perceivable to everyone and that it definitely would not ruin our beer.

10 minutes into our mash we checked the PH and saw that it was right at 5.4 which was perfect.

We fill up a hydrometer test jar with wort in order to test our PH

After inserting our PH probes we saw that our PH was right on target. We use a Milwaukee MW102 PH Meter to test our PH

Since our PH was on target, we did not add any lactic acid.

Hops 

After our 25 minute mash, we pulled the grain basket and set our controller to 100% of power to bring our wort up to a boil as fast as possible.

All of our brewing controllers have the option to go between automatic and manual mode, meaning you can choose a temperature or percentage of power

Similar to our mash, this recipe only calls for a 30-minute boil, half of what a traditional boil is. Fortunately, there was another Brulosophy experiment that tested the impact of boil length on a beer’s flavor. 24 people tasted two all-grain IPAs. One was boiled for 30 minutes and the other for 60. Out of the 24 people, only 9 correctly chose the beer that was boiled for 30 minutes. After reading this experiment, we felt fine about doing a 30 minute boil in order to achieve our goal of finishing these beers as fast as possible.

It's also important to point out that there is no Brulosophy experiment that tests a beer with a shorter mash and shorter boil, but what the Brulosophy experiments show is that playing around with traditional brewing numbers definitely won't ruin your beer in the end.

At the top of our 30-minute boil, we added 1 ounce (28.3 grams) of Nelson Sauvin hops.

About 15 minutes into our boil we connected our wort plate chiller up and ran boiling wort through it in order to sanitize everything.

Since boiling liquid kills bacteria, it's a good idea to recirculate towards the end of the boil just in case there's something in your hoses or plate chiller

At the end of the 30-minute boil we turned our heating element off, turned cooling water on, and added 4 ounces (113.4 grams) of Nelson Sauvin hops as a flameout addition.

We kept the hops in our kettle until everything was cooled down to a yeast pitching temperature of around 75° F (24° C).

We put all of our hops in this mesh container that comes with our brewing system. This allows them to be easily removed and prevents them from clogging any openings

Yeast & Fermentation

The Norwegian Kveik yeast we're using to ferment this beer is the reason we're able to completely finish this beer in 3 days. In order for this yeast to ferment as fast as possible, it has to be kept at a high temperature so we're going to ferment this in our brewing kettle. 

Once the kettle cooled down to a yeast pitching temp of around 75° F (24° C) we aerated our wort by recirculating it through the spray valve that is usually just used during the mash. Typically, we would aerate by shaking our fermenter for 60 seconds after the yeast was pitched. 

After aeration, we were ready to pitch our yeast. The yeast for this beer consists of Hornindal and Voss Kveik yeast from Omega Yeast that was harvested from the batch we did right before this. We pitched our yeast and fermented this beer at 95° F (35° C).

The yeast and dregs we harvested from our previous beer settled quite a bit so we mixed everything together before pitching it

To prepare our kettle for fermentation, we ran the hose coming out of the lid of the kettle into a pot full of Star San to turn it into a blow-off tube and put clamps around the lid of the kettle to make it as airtight as possible.

This beer finished up fermenting the next day and was ready to serve on the third day.

Tasting 

Because this was a single-hop IPA that used only Nelson Sauvin hops, we decided to name it Uncle Nelson.

There wasn’t much aroma to this beer despite the 5 ounces of hops we added to it, but that’s probably due to the high fermentation temperature. To be honest, you can’t really call it an IPA anymore when there isn’t any hop aroma. However, the biggest flavor we got upon tasting this beer was “lemony”. It’s likely that these lemon flavors came from our Kveik yeasts because both of them are described to have citrus flavor profiles. In the end, we were really happy with this beer we finished in just 3 days. We recommend you brew this if you’re also in a pinch and need a beer to share with friends or take to a cookout.

Make sure to check out the third beer we brewed after this one which was made with yeast that was top cropped from the second. Confused? Just watch the video or read the article.