Theme for the brew day: short.
We brewed an imperial IPA based loosely on Russian River’s Pliny the Younger and Three Floyd’s Zombie Dust. Lots of malt, lots of wheat and lots of hops.
We used 32 lbs of grain and just short of 2 lbs of candy sugar. Home brew shop missed 2lbs by an ounce or so.
We used a lot of hops. Cascade and Citra from an unused 5 gallon kit we won in the NHC contest last summer plus a mystery hop from Golden Road Brewing’s contest of the same name. We expected to get a pound of the hop but we received only 10 ounces. Being short 6 ounces was the reason for the poaching of our hop inventory.
We did our best to Burtonize our water but the additions required to bring LA water to Burton on Trent hardness was silly. We added salts to meet in the middle (coming up a bit short of goal).
Our mash temperature was right on. We had only a 67% efficiency, however, coming 12 points short of our OG goal. Clearly our mash tun is not letting us hit reasonable efficiency on high gravity beers. Maybe we need a bigger tun?
The 4lbs of wheat added a lot of protein to the wort.
We did, as we always do, use two yeasts. 
As we did for our Creme Brulee, we took some second runnings for a small beer but had to add some DME and were short of 5 gallons. We used the last of our home grown hops.
While short was the theme, the day progessed rather smoothly and our hope is that the beer should be pretty good. We plan on entering it into the NHC in addition to the intended Golden Road Brewing’s contest.
Los Angeles Brewers 