Five Beers... (six now)

[196osh]

Simcoe is a great aroma hop, I get a mix of pine qualities which are not as much as say something like chinook and a hit of tropical fruit, passionfruit is a good description of the overall smell.

[simple one]

That will be interesting. As the base beer is very manly. Bitter and malty.

Looking forward to the fuggles myself! Roll on next weekend!

[leedsbrew]

great idea hope it turns out well! I did an al simcoe pale and it was 100% pink grapefruit for me! Awesome hop!

[simple one]

Well only 8g went in to all the secondaries.... so that's 5 packets of hops with 90g left.......

[simple one]

Bottled the Saaz up already. Was a little worried about it's shelf life if it wasn't bottled quickly....

- Aroma slight, but oddly the saaz flavour seems to be quite bold. They were 2008 harvest, so maybe the lighter volatiles have gone. Although it may be the coffee/biscuit malt flavours and aromas masking it a bit too.

Lovely beer though.

Edit: They weren't 2008, they were 2010. So no excuses!

[simple one]

Well that's Six beers all bottled up now. Early findings are starting to make me believe that AA% and aroma/flavour oils are very much linked. The general rule has been that aroma is higher in the higher AA%. The lower AA hops (what are classed as classic aroma hops) still add some flavour from dry hopping, but tend to have a very subtle aroma. Obviously this is only over two weeks. I may repeat the experiment with the most aromatic and the least, and try and balance both their aromas to my liking.

Full feedback once the lot have conditioned correctly.

edit: Other useful secondary tips... Use an airlock, don't use a solid bung. Bottling with carbonated beer is very difficult. Never pour boiling water in to demijohns, they can't take it.

[GARYSMIFF]

You`ve made the Don King of Beers

THATS FUNNY

[simple one]

Ok MY findings on dry hoping.

1) Anything left in the beer for over a week can begin to produce a slight haze. Best practice to me seems to be to scale up the dry hops for a week of beer contact.

2) AA% (most likely tied in to essential oil concentration) and the climate of the country of origin tend to give you some sort of rough guide to how hard a dry hop is going to perform.

3) Just because EKG and Fuggles are traditional aroma hops, doesn't mean they are great at producing a large amount of aroma.

4) Some of the stronger hops need a few weeks off the dry hop to calm down.

5) Aluminium mesh or part of a hop sock around the end of the syphon tube helps keep some of the hop particles out of the bottles/kegs when transferring.

6) My ideal dry hoping rate over one week for the six different hops:
These values should give you a reasonable idea of the power of the six hops I used.

EKG - 3g per litre
FUGGLES - 5g per litre
SAAZ - 4g per litre
SIMCOE - 1.5g per litre
CASCADE - 2g per litre
NORTHERN BREWER - 2.5g

This should leave your beer tasting in the realms of an APA without the addition of any other flavour hops, and even with a very flavoursome malt background. In other words these values would be my maximum. If you were to use other late hop additions, or a made a lighter less malty beer then the amount of dry hops needed would be less. All hops were bought from malt miller, bar the northern brewer which was a brupacks foil bag.

[oz11]

Nice one!

[sllimeel]

Well done mate, a great experiment.

Obviously i will have to taste each of these to get some sense of your findings

[llannige]

Nice one.

Keep up the good work.

[dean_wales]

Excellent thread!