Super RIPA

About This Beer

Super RIPA is a 5.5% Specialty IPA built around the red IPA format: enough residual colour and malt character to read as a red ale, with a hop profile pointed squarely at tropical and citrus fruit. The recipe centres Superdelic, a New Zealand triploid aroma variety with red fruit and candy character that pairs well with the colour malts in the grain bill. Citra provides the citrus backbone alongside it, and Moutere handles bittering duty at 60 minutes thanks to its very high alpha acid content.

This was the benchmark red IPA recipe in my lineup for about a year, until the West Coast RIPA series took over with a more refined process. It remains a beer I’d like to revisit.

Ingredients

The grain bill does some real work here. American Ale Malt is the base for a clean, hop-forward platform. Vienna and Aurora sit in the sub-base layer, with Vienna adding a light biscuit sweetness and Aurora contributing the orange/red hue and bready Maillard character. Shepherd’s Delight, used at under 10%, pushes the colour deeper and adds a cola-like richness without tipping into roast. Red Back provides the final red tint and aids head retention. Rye Malt at 4.5% contributes a dry, spicy finish that cuts through the malt sweetness.

Moutere at 60 minutes is an efficient choice for a bittering addition given its 15.5-18% alpha acid content. It also has enough tropical character in its oil profile that it doesn’t disappear into a neutral bitterness. The mid-boil Citra and Superdelic additions at 30 and 10 minutes layer in flavour before the whirlpool picks up the aroma work.

Brew Day

Brewed on the BrewZilla 35L Gen 4. Mash in at 67°C with 17.5 L, sparged 15 L at 80°C. Pre-boil volume came to 28 L. A 2 L top-up was used to hit volume after the boil. Standard Whirlfloc and yeast nutrient additions went in at 10 minutes. OG into fermenter hit the target at 1.054 across 24 L.

Fermentation

Fermented in a pressure-capable vessel at 18°C under 5 PSI for 10 days, then stepped up to 20°C at 0 PSI for 4 days. The single dry hop addition of 100 g Superdelic went in on day 5. Gravity readings during active dry hopping showed fluctuations due to CO2 movement and hop stirring, which stabilised near the estimated terminal of 1.012. No formal FG measurement was recorded.

Fermentation was managed under modest pressure during primary to control ester production, with the pressure dropped for the final conditioning phase and dry hop contact.

The Result

Bottled on 7 December 2023, carbonated to 2.4 vol CO2. Tasted on the same day.

The beer landed exactly where the recipe aimed: a well-balanced red IPA with clear Superdelic character in the dry hop — red fruit, candy, and tropical fruit coming through cleanly against the colour malt base. The malt profile read as red without being heavy. A benchmark for this format in my brewing at the time.

One practical note from this batch: PET bottles can crack at their thick wall sections under carbonation pressure. After this batch, I moved to storing bottles in rectangular plastic tubs or buckets to contain any failures.

What’s Next

This recipe has since been superseded by the West Coast RIPA series, which refined the process and ingredients further. I’d like to revisit Super RIPA at some point — the Superdelic-forward dry hop profile is worth exploring with a more calibrated fermentation setup.