If you’ve been following the Craft Beer Channel for a few years, you might be aware that we once came up with a grapefruit IPA recipe and brewed the beer with Camden Town Brewery and a bunch of other beer nerds. It was a lovely day, but the shoot was a bit haphazard even by our standards. Suffice to say, if we had known it was going to get 45,000 views, Jonny wouldn’t have pretended to be a female fashion vlogger for the majority of it…

After nearly two years of thumbs down, abusive messages and comments like “WTF is this guy doing? Where’s the bloody recipe?!” here we are finally with a perfected recipe of the Juicy Banger we brewed that day. When we made it, the term “juicy” was in its infancy. The hazy ultra-fruity, soft bitterness IPAs were being brewed by then, but only the NE of America had really tasted them. For us back then, it referred to beers that were fruity rather than dank and/or resiny – beers like Pressure Drop Pale Fire, Ballast Point Sculpin and Beavertown Gamma Ray that had pronounce pith and juice notes to the hop character. When we teamed up with Camden Town we wanted to take that pith a little further by adding grapefruit peel.

Since then the juice has been very much set loose around the hoose, so when we sat down to plan a new recipe we thought we’d stay in keeping with the original premise to offer a counterpoint. That said, there were some inherent flaws in the original beer which we have ironed out. We wanted it cleaner, less astringent and even more pith-forward. After some rebrews and redrafts, what we have is a crisp, seriously grapefruity beer with a lightning quick finish. Even on our simple set up it came out really well – singing with juice but being deceptively easy drinking and dry. So here it is – our true Juicy Banger. Old fashioned, but still on point. Check out the homebrew video and the grapefruit IPA recipe below!

Juicy Banger Grapefruit IPA Recipe (30l brewhouse)

Malts
5.38kg pale ale malt

Hops
10g Amarillo
35g Amarillo
100g Mandarina Bavaria

Yeast
WLP001 or similar clean West Coast yeast

Dry Hops
50g Mandarina Bavaria
50g Mandarina Bavaria

Adjuncts
3 grapefruits, peeled and ALL white pith removed
Splash of vodka

Method

1.053 OG | 1.010 FG

Mash in with 11 litres of water at 65ºC for 60mins

Sparge 11.2 litres at 75ºC

Bring to the boil and add 10g of Amarillo. Boil for 45mins.

Add 35g Amarillo and boil for 15mins.

Flame out and reduce to 90ºC and add 100g Mandarina Bavaria and peel of one grapefruit. Whirlpool if possible.

Cool to 21ºC transfer to fermenter and aerate.

Peel the 2 remaining grapefruits and keep in the fridge with a splash of vodka to sterilise.

Add 50g Mandarina Bavaria and peel of one grapefruit during peak of fermentation (likely 48 hours)

Add 50g Mandarina Bavaria and peel of one grapefruit at around 1.020.

Cold crash for 48 hours then bottle/keg.

For more recipes, check out our East Coast IPA recipe (also known as a New England IPA recipe) that we came up with in collaboration with the awesome Gipsy Hill Brewery.