Brewbirds wrote:
What I am asking is if I chose the Mosaic for its high Myrcene content how do I manipulate the hop to key on the Linalool and Geraniol for floral instead of the Citral, Nerol, Limonene etc. that would give me citrus and pine?
If I remember correctly Myrcene is volatile to 140F so a hop stand or hop tea would be a good treatment but that doesn't help to show how to control the oxidation products I want vs. the degradation products I don't want.
I'm just talking manipulation for flavor/aroma treatment here not bittering.
The question applies to any hop variety. The Mosaic is an example, from discussion on The Hats' thread, where it's floral character could be paired with the raisin/stone fruit from C150 a/o Special B.
If I understand what you are trying to get at:
You would need to manipulate the temps to flash off the oils you do not want and keep those you do, but this may not be possible in a wort boil, because once you flash off something in an open pot it's gone off into the air (smells great!), and what's left is whatever is stable at higher temps. So in a wort boil it's pretty much a one way trip, you get whatever is stable at temps higher then where you add it, and only then if temps remain below the flashpoint. You really can't keep only lower temp oils and not the higher temp ones if they are all soluble in your wort or hop tea extract. That said hop tea is different then wort, different compounds are extracted more effectively based on the solutions PH, so you will get different results with hop tea then just wort... but maybe still not what you are looking for...
To actually capture only the lower flashpoint oils and remove those with a higher flashpoint - if that's what you are looking for - you would need to actually distill them with the proper equipment. As in you capture the flashed off vapors of your low temp oil, and when they cool, collect those compounds on the other side of your equipment. Then raise the temp and allow the ones you do not want to flash off without capturing them. Then if you wanted a higher temp oil raise again and capture. That's the only way I know of to preserve the lower temp compounds and selectively remove the higher temp ones that would be possible that could be done by the average joe on his stove top (assuming you have distillation equipment). You would then take what you collected and add it to your cooled wort. You might need to do multiple distillations or multiple passes against the end result to get exactly what you wanted. You would need to know the exact flashpoint of all the oils you wanted to capture.
It would be a lot of work regardless. Your basically making a perfume like substance that you will re-integrate back into your beer at that point.
You could make beer unlike anything anyone has done before that way though. If that's what you really wanted to do.
I don't think I'd ever bother with that level of control personally, except as some crazy experiment if I had more time to spend on something then I knew what to do with. Folks have made good beer for a long time without resorting to that sort of thing.
It would be easier to buy the pure essential oils directly, as long as you can find food safe versions.
