Brewing A Bissell Bothers Substance Clone - The Product

Bissell Brothers "The Substance" is the first IPA that really made me taste hops (more then just the bitterness in a West Coast style IPA) and is still one of my favorite beers of all time.  Luckily, the fact that I live near Portland,  Maine means that it is pretty easy for me to get a hold of.

A couple weeks ago, I saw a reddit post on /r/homebrewing about beer recipes from each state and The Substance was one of the recipes.  While I couldn't get every ingredient, I made some substitutions and brewed up a batch during our most recent snowstorm.

Here is the Beersmith BeerXML file if you are interested.  You'll note that this is not 100% dead on, but I think it should be close.

I ended up buying most of the ingredients from MoreBeer.

I ground all my grain using my Corona style mill pretty fine.  Since I BIAB (brew in a bag), I tend to crush things a bit finer since I feel it helps with my efficiency.

Per Beer Smith, I heated the water to 158 and mashed in dropping the temperature to 152 for 75 minutes.

My Gigawatt kept the temperature close during the mash, but I am looking to insulate it better in the next coming weeks.

I boiled for 60 minutes and added the bittering hops (Apollo).

After my 60 minute boil, I whirl pooled more hops (Centennial and Idaho-7) at knockout for 15 minutes.

I then chilled the wort to ~80 degrees (Maine well water is COLD in the winter :) ) transferred

to my 3 Gallon Fermonster, hit it with 30 seconds of pure oxygen and added the yeast.

Then, as appropriate I had a Substance and moved it to my fermentation chamber with a blow off tube to ferment at 68 for the next couple days.

I'll dry hop in a couple days and then bottle.  Once it is done, I'll post a link back to how it came out.