Don’t try to bottle condition NEIPA!

It is so susceptible to oxidisation it seems to be practically impossible to condition it in a bottle. i.e. to rely on secondary fermentation to carbonate the beer.

This style of beer contains a lot of protein and hops. It is this that make it susceptible to oxidation. I tried to bottle one batch recently, but it oxidised in a week – turning a murky brown colour and losing a lot of its hop flavour. The beer had been chilled to 1C before bottling and I purged the racking bucket with CO2 before use, but none of this appears to have made any difference. I posted a question about bottle conditioning NEIPA (New England IPA) via one of the Facebook groups and go the overwhelming response that it wasn’t a good idea! Others seem to have tried it and got the same result as me (see below). I wish I had known this before I tried!

This all came as a bit of a surprise as I hadn’t come across this advice at all when reading up on brewing NEIPA. I felt like I had missed the memo about not bottling NEIPA!! I wonder if it also explains why you don’t see much NEIPA on sale in the supermarkets.

What at the alternatives?

Well, the best alternative seems to be to keg it. It is much easier to transfer the beer from the fermenter into a keg without exposing it to any oxygen. The beer is then force carbonated with CO2 from a bottle! No waiting for secondary fermentation and no bottles to clean! But it does mean that you can’t share it with your mates! So I have tried this with my second attempt at NEIPA (see picture below).

Once it is carbonated in a keg, you could fill bottles using a counter pressure filler. Something like a Blichmann Beer Gun. They are particularly expensive – around £100. This enables you to fill a bottle with CO2, then fill it will beer from the bottom and then fill the headspace with CO2. I think this is more or less the same process that commerical brewers use.