The first batch had a bit too much crystal malts. I was shooting for an Imperial Irish Ale. Although you could see the reddish tint when held up to a bright light, it appeared fairly dark brown. I had dry hopped it with a quarter ounce each of Simcoe and Williamette pellets, so it had a nice bitter finish, but not too bad. It came out pretty malty, and the ABV wasn't as high as expected. I looked at the specs for the Irish Ale yeast and realized it only attenuates to 70%, so it left behind a lot of sugar and resulted in 5.6% ABV instead of 8%.
WP-02 was brewed about a month later and I reduced some of the crystal, but kept the flaked barley and Carared malt. Still came out a bit dark, but the red was showing better. ABV came out about the same.
WP-03 was very different, took out all the Munich and extra crystal, exc for the Carared. I screwed up the mash with too high of temperature of strike water and didn't detect it soon enough. I was doing a single infusion mash and the temperature gradients in the tun were pretty wide. I only managed to get 3.5% out of it. So as a hail mary, I threw in a bottle of Jameson's to get it over 5%. I skipped the dry hopping this time. I popped a bottle after a week and thought that if it didn't get better, I'd dump the lot.
After another week and a half, it really matured. Over two weeks after bottling it was actually damn good enough bring it in to work to distribute. I called it WP-03 Hot Fix as a tribute to the Jameson's fix.
