Hopstache Black IPA - Brew Night

I got home from work today and decided I'd start the batch of black IPA. The ingredients were sitting in my closet crying out for attention. Every time I opened the closet door, where I store all of my brewing-related items, I could smell the grains. While I really enjoy them, I've never made an IPA before (only standard pale ales), let alone a black one...

So I sanitized all the necessary items for the whole process and started the boil. The end result - my apartment smells like someone blew up a hops packaging facility in my kitchen. I opted to not use muslin bags while hopping the beer wort because I like to get as much hop utilization as possible by adding it directly. I should have used bags for this batch, however, or at least strained it out before pouring it in the carboy. There's almost an inch of hop trub that sank to the bottom, and that's still with a huge portion of it left behind in the boiling pot. Whatever - worst case scenario, I'll have a little less liquid, but a lot more hoppy flavor. This is also the first time I decided to use a blow-off setup for the primary fermentation instead of a regular airlock, mainly because it's a higher gravity beer, and I've heard the yeast can be incredibly active. I didn't want to risk having krausen (that's the foam while it's fermenting) all over my closet because of excess CO2 build-up. So now it's all done and ready for the yeasties to go "om nom nom".

EDIT: Less than 8 hours in and it's happily fermenting away. The blow-off tube is releasing the pressure just fine. Probably a good thing that I set that up - this is very active yeast.

Next steps:  dry hop to secondary, wait, bottle, wait...