There's an easy answer to your question: It depends.Wings_Fan_In_KC wrote:All right.......rusty as I am......I've got 2.5 ounces of Amarillo, 2.5 ounces of Centennial and 1 ounce of Cascades. I'll work out the times of the boils, etc but any opinions of which of the three I've got on hand to use as the bittering hops? I'm leaning towards using the Amarillo as the dry hop and either C hops works in a faux IPA so......??
It really all depends on what you want. I think all three of those are considered dual use (bittering and flavor/aroma). So you can really mix and match them any way you want.
Personally, I only use Cascade hops for bittering if I'm doing a SMaSH, because it's relatively low in AA%. Both of the others have higher AA%, so they'll give more bitterness with a long boil. So then it comes down to what you want from the flavor and aroma portion. If you use brewing software like BeerSmith, QBrew, etc, I'd plug different amounts of the different hops at different times to see how the beer will turn out, keeping in mind what I want for the flavor and aroma of the beer.
One thing to consider is that the brewing software is generally predicated on using fresh hops, and they'll lose AA over time (how much depends greatly on how they were stored). If they're fairly old, I would definitely smell them first. If they smell like cheese, you can probably still use them for bittering, but I wouldn't use them for flavor or aroma.
