[rodwha]

I am conducting a hop character test. 4 small batches with a tiny bittering addition (.25 oz) followed by a 1.75 oz addition at either 21, 14, 7 mins or a whirlpool.

Initially I had read many moons ago that a hotter temp (~185*) worked more like a “flavor” addition and a cooler temp (~155*) worked more like an “aroma” addition. Denny here recommended the cooler temp and so I decided to shoot for 154*. However my small 2.75 gal batch cooled way too quickly and when I checked it was sitting at 120*. Will this behave more like a short dry hop? I’m concerned that my whirlpool example might not stack up well and won’t make for a good comparison to make a judgement on. This sat for 35 mins BTW.

So what say you? How would a 120* compare to a 154* or even a 185*?

[RC]

154* still causes an appreciable amount of isomerization (i.e. bitterness). 120* does not, so my prediction is that this beer will taste sweeter than the others.

As for "behaving like a short dry hop", I have no idea. But I'm very curious to know how the hop flavor/aroma turns out in this beer. I've never heard of nor tried hopping at that kind of temp, so anyone's guess is as good as mine. Although, my guess is that the hop character will be similar to a flameout addition, seeing as how fermentation will scrub out a lot of it, and oils/resins will stick to the yeast, as they always do...

[denny]

I accidentally WP hopped at 120 once.  Turned out so well that's my temp now.

[rodwha]

I suppose that a whirlpool at 120* differs from a dry hop addition?

So if you whirlpool at 120* what does the rest of your typical IPA hop schedule look like? As an aside I recall you mentioning that you like your beers to have a substantial bitterness. I’m curious what that generally looks like.

BTW the hop I used is Centennial.

[RC]

I accidentally WP hopped at 120 once.  Turned out so well that's my temp now.

What kind of bitterness did this contribute?

For my IPAs, 100% of my kettle hops are added either at flameout or after cooling to ~160. But at 160, I'm still getting most of the bitterness I get at flameout. I've considered dropping even cooler to, say, 140, but I don't know where the temp cutoff is between "still getting a ton of isomerization" vs. "getting some but not much." So I'd love to know your impression of the bitterness contribution from steeping at 120.

[BrewBama]

Interesting that you are doing this. I recently played around with steeping hops at various temperatures of water. Though water and wort are very different, based on what I experienced, I agree that the bittering will be less in the cooler wort.

Along those lines, I have been listening to a brewer that has been testing several varieties of hops using a hop stand in a common recipe. He is comparing tastes and bitterness that he gets at the same temp and same length of hop stand using different varieties. Since the various varieties have different AA%, he devised a simple calculation to determine a qty to use in his brewhaus on his system to normalize the variance. He even sent samples to a lab that told him what the actuals are which turns out were within a fairly consistent range given all the potential tolerance stack up. Pretty interesting stuff y’all are doing.

Because of what that brewer is doing and the fact that I stumbled across More Beer’s Single Hop Experiment series, I decided to plan a series of Pale Ales over the summer to experiment with various hop varieties.  Everything will be the same recipe and process up to and including the bittering hop charge at 60 min, then I’ll use different hops at 10 min and 1 min (trying to keep each addition at about 10 IBUs Tinseth via BeerSmith).  I want to experience some tasty hops while (hopefully) verifying I can get consistency from my system and brewhaus processes.  We’ll see.


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[rodwha]

Nice! Do report back on what you find.

A hoppy pale ale is what I do when I come across a hop that’s new to me. One of my favorites is HBC 342. For whatever reason it’s still an experimental hop, though it’s been available for many years. I got my hands on it something like 6-7 years ago.