Ruination? - Light beer!
90 minute? - Your time has run out!
Pliny? - Please!I hereby lay claim to having made the hoppiest beer in history! I welcome your stories to come knock me off my perch!

I turned 50 last week, and my party is Saturday. My wife turned 50 back in March, and she asked for an Orval clone for her party. (It came out really nice.) So back in March I was already thinking about what I should make. I knew it had to be a hop bomb, but what
exactly to do? 50 years, 50 ibus? Nothing special there. How about:
50 ounces of hops? That's right, I used 50 ounces of hops in one ten gallon batch of what I'm calling Hop50. I took my Double IPA recipe and increased the gravity a little, and started acquiring hops. Columbus, cascade, centennial, and simcoe. Despite being advised to cheat by using a bunch of low alpha hops to get to the 50 ounce level (I was offered 25 oz of 0.6% alpha Tettnang), I stuck with varieties appropriate for a Double Imperial. Mash hops, first wort hops, additions every 5 minutes, plus dry hops. It
calculates to 362 ibu, but I'm well aware that this is way past the level of solubility for bitterness. The OG was 1.098, FG is 1.025. I ended up with about 7.5 gallons in the fermenter. I lost nearly three gallons to wetting the hops, and that's using mostly pellets!
The finished beer is certainly the highest hop flavor I've ever experienced. However, the
perceived bitterness is not as high as I expected. My wife says there's so much going on there that you just can't experience it all (she's a BJCP Master, so she's probably right). The aroma is strong, but not overpowering. If I could
afford to do it again, I'd move more of the hops into dry hopping. The malt character (yes, it has detectable malt!) supports the beer really well. I wouldn't change a thing there.
Finally, for the record, Siamese Moose is a new name for my on-line activities, and this is my first post under that name. I'll send a party invite to the first person who names me!
