Citra Hop Focused Ale

Ever since buying the Conical Fermenter quality of brews has not been quite what I've been wanting - however this also coincided with trying to brew beers with much more hop aroma.

A clone of Brewdog's Hop Fiction was not quite what I wanted.  The second attempt is better - but still not perfect.

A slight downside is there is a bit of Russian Roulette, I didn't label beers from this batch, nor from the Mouteka brew - which isn't so good as they both have Blue crown caps. I reckon there's an equal number of Mouteka vs Citra bottles left.

In any case this brew means

a) A concial fermenter isn't worse than a £13 plastic bucke

b) Safale US-05 isn't fundamentally flawed compared to Safale S-04

c) Dry hopping is good.

Current train of thought is that the sub-optimal brews are down to larger quantity of hops (5.6g per L vs 12g per L). It might be coincidence but the last two brews was the second Hop Fiction clone - which isn't conditioning well, and a Dr Rudi hop focused ale which is doing much better. The latter had 50g of dry-hops.....

.... so for 2018 will cap dry-hop at 2gm/L.

.... also will not use Honey... somewhere along the line I've read that rather than simple sugars given yeast a head-start they might just exhaust themselves on the simple sugars and give up finishing with the complex sugars from the malt.