Brew Day 4/22/2012 Whiskey Soaked Oak IPA

Another weekend down, another brew bubbling in the fermentor. This weekend I ramped up the ole roadhouse system for a batch of Whiskey Soaked Oak IPA my brother wanted to make. He said he used a grain bill similar to an Odell IPA Clone he had read in Brew Your Own magazine. His plan is to soak the oak wood chips in some Makers Mark whiskey for a couple of days and then add the wood chips to the secondary, and then of course drink the whiskey. However, I may have talked him into saving the whiskey and adding it to half of the batch of IPA during bottling. His hope is that the chips will give the IPA a slightly oaky, vanilla taste. I've read that some people feel that the true IPA style was probably orginially this way, due to the beers being stored in oak barrels during long oversea hauls. Which makes sense to me. All and all the day went fairly smooth. Mash temps were hit, also managed to maintain the temp with not much flucuation, sparging was effortless. The boil started out quickly and began to boil over but after a few quick stirs it calmed down into a nice rolling boil. Used some tea balls for the first time for the hops in an effort to reduce hop particles entering the Dalton cool down process. I have to say they worked really well as far as keeping the wort clean of hop particles. The only thing I could see detrimental was that hop pellets, when placed into the tea balls expands rapidly, and I dont know if the wort makes constant contact to extract the most hop resin potential. The loose leef hops seemed to do better and there was clearly more head space left for wort to circulate thru. Managed to get one 20 foot pole made for the hop garden. Hoping to get the other one made this weekend, but with the spoonbill fishing trip it may be delayed for another week.