Saturday, March 14, 2015

New Round of Hop Tastings

Things have been fairly quiet on the brewing front for me for a little while now. I did manage to squeeze in a 3-pack of single-hopped brews recently and I'll be posting my tasting notes in the next few days. This time around I brewed with Wai-iti and Kohatu from New Zealand, as well as an experimental variety known as "Experimental J-Lime".

I changed up my recipe a little bit compared to my usual mix of Extra Light DME + Munich LME. This time I went with 14 oz of Light DME and 3 oz of Carahell. The CaraHell was steeped for 10 minutes as the kettle came up to temp. I stuck to my usual hopping schedule of 40-45 IBU added as soon as I pulled the grains (calculated as a 20-minute addition). This was followed by 1/4 oz at flameout and 1/2 oz as dry hops.

Generally speaking, I found that the hop character of these beers was less than my typical trial batch. I don't blame the hops for this; I blame my new recipe. These beers all turned out maltier than usual, and I think that tended to shift the balance away from the hops a bit.

For full disclosure, I also have one more caveat. I ran out of 1-gallon glass jugs, so the J-lime batch was fermented in a 1-gallon HDPE water jug. I feel like this is important to note because the J-Lime had significantly less hop character than the other beers. I do have some concerns that the HDPE container may have adsorbed some of the hop compounds leading to decreased hop character.

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