Whats your Favourite Hop?

[Martin the fish]

What is your favourite Hop and why?

As a newbie to all this i have little idea what hop does what to taste, why people use one over the other etc. So i thought this might be good for me to ingest and for you to have a shout about your most prized Hop.

Currently mine is Fuggles just because it has the best name

[steve_flack]

Probably Amarillo or Liberty - although I seem to use more Goldings and Challenger than anything else.

[Martin the fish]

Probably Amarillo or Liberty - although I seem to use more Goldings and Challenger than anything else.

Why is this?

[steve_flack]

Amarillo becuase it has a really nice orangey citrus flavour - a bit like the C-hops but a bit smoother to my tastes. Liberty is a very nice Hallertau type hop that also works well in recipes where you'd normally use goldings. I've made some great bitters with Liberty as the finishing hop.

I tend to use a lot of Goldings as they're traditional hops for bitters (and I've got a lot of them to use). For some reason I've got into using Challenger for bittering in my bitters although when my stock runs out I might move over to using Magnum instead as it's a very economical clean bittering hop.

[mysterio]

might move over to using Magnum instead as it's a very economical clean bittering hop.

I got the last ounce of Magnum from H&G at the end of last year, I wonder if they'll have any in this year...

My favourite is probably Styrian Goldings for ales, I just love the flavour. I've got a good kilo left in my stash.

For lagers I love the taste of Saaz but I rarely use it.

Last year I probably used mostly Goldings and Cascade along with Styrians.

[steve_flack]

I've got some more from Ross that I think are from the same batch as the H&G ones (same alphas). I've got around 200g in total which should last a while! I've also got some Horizon as well.

EDIT: It seems Ross is out of them now as well.

[steve_flack]

That's very unlikely to happen. In fact rather the opposite. Big brewers don't generally buy a variety, they buy alpha so economically it makes more sense to plant the varieties with the most alpha. The high alpha varieties also generally are easier to look after and less prone to disease. People will have to be prepared to pay a lot more for aroma varieties to make it worth planting them. I doubt much of the new acreage going in this year will be aroma.

[Martin the fish]

So I need to work on producing a high AA% EKG then

So you like East Kent Goldings and Challenger DaaB?

[TC2642]

I prefer different hops for different beers, WGV for bitters and the like, Fuggles for the darker beers, Saaz and hallertauer for Belgians, Mt Hood are particually nice for APA's, overall I think it would have to be WGV, although I have started to broaden my horizon, and I'll be using some of those melinka (sp?) for a beer on Sunday and Green Bullet for an IPA sometime in the future.