Tuesday, 4 February 2025

Juice Boost 2.0 - Hazy IPA - Tasting Results/Review

Our second iteration of the Juice Boost Hazy IPA (previously NEIPA) with a slightly tweaked grain bill and hop schedule compared to the original. It's a decent hazy in our opinion, but there's still some things we'll look at tweaking for version 3...

Appearance

Well, it certainly looks like it should. Super hazy and a lovely light golden, borderline straw colour. The haze factor was never going to be an issue really, with a decent charge of oats, wheat, and a haze promoting yeast strain, Pomona. The head pours thick, white and fluffy, but unfortunately doesn't have much stability and collapses fairly soon after pouring. Not a particularly big deal and a common theme with hazy's and is a result of the oil content in the oats.

Aroma

There's plenty of hop aroma as you'd expect. As with the original version, it's fairly well dominated by the Citra hops. We knew this would like happen as we said the same thing in our review of the original Juice Boost, but alas included it (Citra) again in this beer anyway so find ourselves saying the same thing. The Simcoe and Amarillo contribute some other tropical fruit aromas, and perhaps a tiny bit of cattiness from the Simcoe as well - all in all it makes for a winning combination of hops.

Flavour

By all rights this is a pretty good beer, but we can't help but feel it's a little bit lacking. Is it the hops, or lack thereof? No, there's plenty of hop character, though just like with the aroma, it's dominated by Citra, but the Amarillo and Simcoe are certainly contributing as well. The flavour did take a good couple of weeks in the keg to mellow out and get past the initial "hop burn" stage, which wasn't particularly bad, but still noticeable.

Is it the yeast? No, the yeast is good and has contributed some nice fruity esters and a little biotransformation. Our first time using Pomona and we're happy with the results, though we must admit we're not totally blown away with it and can't see it's really all that different to other popular (dry) yeast strains for hazy's like Verdant IPA or Lallemand East Coast. It's perhaps been a little overhyped, but we'll still be using it again.

So what is it? Well, after a bit of reflection, we think it's the malted oats. Compared to rolled oats, the malted oats just seem a bit lacking, and haven't contributed that nice, slick, oily mouth feel that you normally expect with a hazy IPA. It's still there, but just nowhere near as prominent, so the mouth feel is a little light or thin, and the overall drinking experience just feels like it's missing something, and this is our best guess as to what it is.

Final Thoughts

This beer is good, but as we mentioned above just feels a little bit lacking to us. We think changing up the malted oats by replacing them either entirely or in part with rolled oats would really bring it to life and change it from a good beer to a great beer.

All the other elements for a great hazy are here - loads of new world hops, strong chloride to sulfate ratio, and a yeast strain designed specifically for this style of beer.

The hop schedule has worked well, and the inclusion of a neutral bittering addition of Warrior at the start of the 30 minute boil has worked well, helping to get the IBU's up to where they need to be without having to throw even more hops into the whirlpool or later in the boil. We'll keep this for future hazy IPA recipes, as less hops in the whirlpool/boil means more are available for dry hopping.

We'll say it yet again, and that is we really need to make a hazy without Citra hops, so when we come back to this for version 3, we'll hopefully heed our own advice.

The other challenge we face with brewing bigger beers like this is the limitations of our 35L BrewZilla. While we normally achieve a 75% mash efficiency (or better) with most beer styles, we find anything that includes oats gives a noticeable drop in efficiency, meaning we often need to add dextrose to make up for the losses - just like we did for this one, and the original Juice Boost. 

Ideally we'd adjust the recipe and add more of everything else to make up for the losses, but as it is we're pretty close to maxing out the BrewZilla so throwing more grain into the mix may even make the problem worse? Time to upgrade to a 65L BrewZilla and use it for single batches and have that extra head room for large grain bills? Maybe... the Gen 4 65L does look pretty nice....

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