Deschutes Red Chair NWPA clone home brew recipe
Saturday, July 17th, 2010Deschutes made a great beer this year, Red Chair NWPA (North West Pale Ale). Besides Ninkasi, this is really the only beer I would buy from the store again. Naturally, I wanted to make a clone recipe. I think this came pretty close for my first attempt, very drinkable beer.
1/30/2011 Update: Based on my experiments I have updated the recipe on this page.
Grains (all grain):
6.5 lb 2-row Pale
1.0 lb Crystal 20L
0.5 lb Carastan (30L)
1.0 lb Munich
1.0 lb Pilsner
0.5 lb CaraPils
(@ 75% brewhouse efficiency, 5.25 gallon batch)
Grains (extract):
Steep the following for 30 minutes at 150F
0.5 lb Crystal 20L
0.25 lb Carastan 30L
0.5 lb Munich Light
0.5 lb Pilsner
6.5 lb of Light dry malt extract
or
8 lb of Light liquid malt extract
Hops:
Zeus, 1 ounce, 60 minutes
Cascade, 0.5 ounce, 15 minutes
Cascade, 0.5 ounce, 5 minutes
Cascade, 1 ounce, 1 minute (flame out)
Cascade, 1 ounce, dry hop
Yeast:
Wyeast 1098 British Ale Yeast
Style 14B (American IPA) stats:
The beer does not qualify as a Pale Ale according to BJCP standards. The IBU’s are up around 60, clearly putting it into the league of IPAs. The gravity is just barely outside what qualifies as an American IPA.
OG: 1.056 – 1.075
IBUs: 40 – 70
FG: 1.010 – 1.018
SRM: 6 – 15
ABV: 5.5 – 7.5%
This Recipe:
OG: 1.055
IBUs: 66
FG: 1.015
SRM: 7.7
ABV: 5.6%
Fermented in the primary for 19 days at 64-68F, then bottled.
Notes:
I updated this 1/30/2011 based on my second try. The beer is much better than the first attempt.
I would highly recommend dry hopping with cascade, and maybe swapping out some of the Zues bittering hops for Cascade, keeping IBU’s the same.
The color, maltniness, and body are spot on, good head retention, and a beautiful golden amber color.
Do not use Centennial hops in Red Chair! That threw me off. Also in the last batch I had one pound of Carastan malt which added a roasted toffee flavor bite. Cutting back the Carastan helped a lot. I also switched to Wyeast 1098 British Ale Yeast (same as White Labs WLP007 English Dry). It is my new favorite yeast. I have never seen a more compacted yeast cake. The beer was drinkable in 3 weeks!
Thanks to the folks at homebrewtalk for input and disccusion on this recipe:
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/deschutes-red-chair-nwpa-knockoff-recipe-construction-160178/
More information about Red Chair NWPA:
https://www.deschutesbrewery.com/brews/seasonal-ales/red-chair-nwpa/default.aspx