I like my NEIPAs hazy as hell and seriously hoppy and juicy. And I make a pretty darn good one. My suggestions to achieve this (YMMV of course):
Malt: Bump up the haze-forming, higher-protein malts to about 40% of the grist. My go-to grain bill for my hazies is simply 60%:40% pale malt:wheat malt. If I'm feeling spunky I'll replace ~5% of the pale malt with vienna. (I've never needed rice hulls, even when I brew wheat beers with 60% wheat malt.)
Hops: If you're able to partially chill the wort, consider steeping the 100g charge of kettle hops after chilling the wort to ~170, rather than steeping right at flameout. You'll get a little more hop punch from this. Bitter to about 20-25 BUs with a single, simple 60-min addition. I've always gotten a lot of bitterness from dry-hopping so I go with a fairly low BU level on the hot side to compensate. And I go relatively big on the dry hopping. Your dry hop rate for both charges combined is only about 1 lb/bbl. I never go below 3 lb/bbl when I dry hop my IPAs. So consider tripling your dry hop charge. You may not have enough African promise for this, but on the hot side the varietal is less important, so you could use something else. I always do a single dry hop charge. I have found that adding at 3 days and then more at 7 days does not make a bit of difference compared to adding the combined amount all at once for a 3-day stand.
Some of this might seem contrary to the "conventional wisdom" for brewing NEIPAs, e.g. bittering only with a flameout charge, dry-hopping while primary is active, "biotransformation," multiple dry hop additions, yada yada yada. I have tried all these magical NEIPA-centric processes and I am skeptical of all of them. I have found that none of them make a better NEIPA compared to when I use simpler, more established brewing processes.
Topic: NEIPA Help (Read 3134 times)
