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Brutal Bitter v2
Kegged on June 20, 2011.
I had another Brewcraft kit for the Brutal Bitter beer, so I decided to add a few extra ingredients to my second batch. I had heard of chocolate IPAs and apricot IPAs, so I decided to combine them. Besides the Wyeast Pacman (1764) yeast I also picked up four 15 ounce cans of apricots (peeled apricot chunks in almond flavored light syrup) and unsweetened cocoa powder. I blended the apricots along with five fluid ounces of the cocoa powder and added it to the wort near flame out. Below is an image of the additional ingredients I used.
The original gravity was 1.067, although I am not sure how much the apricot fiber particles might have influenced the reading. After five days in the primary the hops for dry hopping were added in a mesh bag. After eight more days the beer was transferred to a secondary container (I don't remember if I also transferred the hops) where it stayed for 25 days, for a total time of 38 days. The final gravity was 1.010; the alcohol content was 7.5% assuming my original gravity reading was mostly due to the sugar in the wort and not the blended fiber from the apricots.
The beer turned out pretty good, although I really couldn't taste any chocolate or apricot flavor. Some of my friends thought they could taste the additional flavors; unfortunately I don't remember how similar it was to my first batch. One interesting observation was while the beer was in the secondary container a bunch of floating clumps started to appear, at first I thought it was something growing in the beer, but it turned out to be the blended fiber particles clumping together. The only problem these clumps caused was while I was kegging the beer I wasn't able to get all of the beer out of the carboy because the clumps started to fall apart as the beer level dropped.