Collab day with Overtone: Triangulate

Few months ago Pim visited Overtone while traveling around Scotland. He brought a bag of goodies to the be brewery. Impressed with the beers sampled the brewteam was immediately excited with a potential collaboration. Even though that we had to wait until August to host Dan and Kayley at our brewery in Alkmaar the excitement didn’t fade away. We were finally able to share our passion about beer and brewing to, together, come up with an extreme IPA. 

Overtone is an established name in the hoppy beer scene and us, here at the Moersleutel, if you allow us the statement, have improved our IPA game significantly. It was then obvious that we had to brew a big fat hoppy IPA. As we had been impressed by their single-hopped Oat Cream IPA we wanted to try our take on that style. But we did that our way, without lactose and double everything. 

Commercial Examples 

Oat Cream IPAs have been popular for a few years now. They’re a twist on the New England IPA style. A twist that focus on copious amounts of oats added to the grist and lactose to maximize the creamy mouthfeel, leaving a touch of residual sweetness to balance out the enormous amounts of hops added during the process. It is difficult to tell who started the style but, to us, Other Half ties up with our first memory of it. 

Fermentables 

The beer style unveils that plenty of oats were used. What it doesn’t say is that we used three different kinds of oats, malted, flaked and caramilized. In addition to the oats we add our IPA signature base malt blend of british malts to maximize flufiness without recourse to any lactose. 

Over a third of the mash was composed of Oats, which lighten the color, a pale and bright yellow colored beer can be expected. The filtration was nice and slow to ensure maximum efficiency in our extraction, that allows us to offer an extremely creamy beeer without unfermentable sugars. 

This big bad boy read over 25 plato, to an expected 8.5% ABV. An incredible bomb of flavor to host the insane amounts of hops ready to be added to the kettle. 

Hops 

Overtone most sucessful Oat Cream IPA was a Mosaic single-hopped beer. It was time we brewed its counterpart. Single-hopped Citra Oat Cream DIPA. But that was the only single thing single in this brew. Everything else we either double or tripled. 

To capture the full Citra essence and saturate the beers with its flavor we used multiple Citra-based products and hop suppliers. Choosing a single-hop it doesn’t mean we can’t explore multiple ways to express its profile. So we called around several suppliers and ended up with a mix of T90 pellets, BBC pellets, Spectrum, Incognito, Cryo and Lupomax. 

These additions were distributed during the process, from bittering to flavor. For the whirlpool stage we saved up multiple charges that were dosed in the kettle at different stages that lowered brewhouse yield but impart intense flavors and aromas.  

But we’re not over yet, there’s still room to take this the extra-mile. To mimic what we’ve done at the hot side of the process we had to do the same in between fermentation and maturation. It peaks to a total of three different moments of dry-hop with three diferent types of Citra used. 

Yeast 

Selected yeast from the healthiest and most expressive option available to boost peach and apricot aromatics with a rounding touch of vanilla to balance the sweetness. The fermentation profile led to a pillowy creamy mouthfeel, preserving the unctuous nature of oats.