The black IPA was ready to try this weekend, I think it's up there with the best I've made, but it was a little too hoppy. The color was as black as it can get, held it up to a light in a clear glass and could barely see through it. I will definitely be making this again with taking about an ounce of hops out (I think I had 5-6oz for a 5gal batch but I need to check what I ended at with the recipe).
I made an attempt at a tripel yesterday, a friend came by and did a brew alongside it as well so that was pretty cool with 2x 5gal batches going. Both of us ran into the same issue though, we started with 6-6.5 gal in the hop boil but both ended around 3-3.5gal of ending wort. He boiled some water and added it to it to get his up to 5gal, I kept mine at the level it ended at, somewhere just under 4gal. I figure I would rather end with less of what I intended rather than diluting it with water before adding yeast.
I also made a started for the yeast since it was going to be high ABV, I didn't have any DME so I used sparge runoff from the batch, let it cool down then added the liquid yeast to the cooled down runoff. it will get added to the fermenter tonight, I figured that starting the fermentation one day later was better than possibly not having enough active yeast to get up to the ABV I was targeting. I made three additional starters this way for future use, putting them in a mason jar and into the freezer to defrost the day before the next brew.
I really don't know how this is going to turn out, there are a lot of uncertainties around the brew process but I'll report back in about a month when it gets done bubbling
