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Recipe: Wye Hill Luminous Beings
Described as “an ultramodern meditation on the relationship between hops and yeast,” this hazy pale ale—double dry-hopped with Mosaic and Motueka, and fermented with Omega’s thiolized Cosmic Punch—won gold at the 2022 Great American Beer Festival.
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For more on how this beer came to be, see Why Hill brewing director Greg Winget’s Brewer’s Perspective: The Origins of Luminous Beings.
ALL-GRAIN
Batch size: 5 gallons (19 liters)
Brewhouse efficiency: 72%
OG: 1.054
FG: 1.016
IBUs: 35
ABV: 5%
[PAYWALL]
MALT/GRAIN BILL
8.4 lb (3.8 kg) pilsner
1.9 lb (862 g) malted oats
HOPS SCHEDULE
0.5 oz (14 g) Taiheke as mash hops [2 IBUs]
0.2 oz (6 g) CTZ at 60 minutes [10 IBUs]
1.5 oz (43 g) Mosaic at whirlpool [15 IBUs]
1.5 oz (43 g) Motueka at whirlpool [8 IBUs]
0.5 oz (14 g) each Mosaic and Motueka at first dry hop
2 oz (57 g) each Mosaic and Motueka at second dry hop
YEAST
Omega Yeast Cosmic Punch Ale (OYL-402)
DIRECTIONS
Mill the grains and mash at 156°F (69°C) for 45 minutes. Recirculate until the runnings are clear, then run off into the kettle. Sparge and top up as necessary to get about 6.5 gallons (25 liters) of wort, depending on your evaporation rate. Boil for 60 minutes, adding hops according to the schedule. After the boil, do a whirlpool step: Stir or recirculate to create a vortex, cooling the wort to 180°F (82°C) if possible. Add hops and continue whirlpooling for 30 minutes, then allow another 30 minutes to steep. Chill to about 64°F (18°C), aerate the wort, and pitch the yeast. Ferment at 64°F (18°C), allowing the beer to free rise as high as 68°F (20°C). When fermentation is complete and the gravity has stabilized, add first dry hops and allow the temperature to rise as high as 72°F (22°C) for a diacetyl rest. Once the beer passes a forced diacetyl test (see Hunting for Diacetyl), after about 48 hours, cool to 55–60°F (13–16°C) and add the second dry hops. After 48 more hours, crash, package, and carbonate to about 2.4 volumes of CO2.
BREWER’S NOTES
For your brewing water, target a 2:3 sulfate-chloride ratio. Add phosphoric acid to the drop post-boil pH to about 4.8 before adding the whirlpool hops.
