This “beer” has developed a bit of a legendary status in my lab. I’ve told them so long as I’m not wretching when I bottle it, I am bottling it. I have at least one co-worker that will drink one if I do. I wouldn’t call you a pessimist at all. This is going to be one bad beer.
Alpha King weighs in at about 60-70 IBUs. It is, indeed, a delicious, hoppy, (yet still very drinkable in quantities, in my opinion) beer.
If you want HOPS, then you want Three Floyd’s Dreadnaught, which boasts 100 IBUs. It’s perhaps my favorite Imperial IPA–alongside Goose Island’s Imperial IPA and the Dogfish Head 90.
well, I have a minimalist approach to brewing born out of living in foreign countries where you have to make due instead of being able to doh! I don’t have enough malt and run out to get some. And I don’t have a garage full of space to store all the brew stuff.
First, my fermenter is a 5 gallon plastic bottle that bottled water comes in. Pop the top and bung in an airlock. So when I brew there’s still a couple of gallons of water in the fermenter. You can try to cool it if you want but I don’t bother.
Second, I usually have two brew pots. One is basically to sterilize some of the malt, and once it’s boiled I take it off the stove. usually I boil with minimal amounts of hops. It gives an aroma effect. usually, I just put the brew pot into a bath of chilled water for 5 or 10 minutes and it cools off quite a bit. Then add to my fermenter and pitch the yeast.
Third, for the real brewpot, when there’s about 10-15 minutes left in the boil, I’ll pour off maybe half of the wort and chill that in a bath, and then add to the fermenter.
Fourth, when the boil is done, I’ll chill it and the pour into the fermenter.
I’ve also double bagged ice and then thrown that into the wort. I’ve also just left the brew pot on the stove for 2 hours and it chilled naturally. Also used cold tap water into the fermenter. Tossed in ice cubes. Finally, used the chilled water from my fridge and poured that into the fermenter and poured hot wort straight off the boil in. One can have bad luck, but really it’s hard to make beer undrinkable after you have a few batches under your belt.
hydrometers - they are to laugh. Listen to the brewforce or at least don’t worry, relax, have a homebrew.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that guerilla brew style with random ingredients does not lend itself to replication nor closely matching a target beer. But it suits me.
Now China Guy is my kind of brewer.
One of the best beers we ever made was totally Jedi. We were in the back of the brewshop after hours, and the urge just hit us. We mashed all the floor-sweepings from under the grain mill, added all the malt that had become unlabeled, tossed in some random white powder (rice solids, malto-dex, who knows?), and hopped it with all the expired hops in the freezer. We could only estimate the SG as being somewhere above 2.0. The hydrometer bounced when we tried to measure it. We pitched a ton of champagne yeast and a semi-ton of ale yeast and fermented that bad boy. We ended up with 7 gallons of something we called Leviathan. Finishing gravity was 1.25 or thereabouts.
It won the Barleywine category at a dozen homebrew competitions in 3 states. 
Never underestimate the power of the Force.