BeerBorg

Root Skier wrote:I'm glad this topic got posted. As a new brewer, I am trying to "understand" hop usage.

What significance does the AA rating play in bettering, flavor, aroma and dry hopping?
Is the AA rating a factor in determining how much hops to use?

Most packages show Alpha (and Beta) Acid levels in percentages because they can change from one season to the next.

The AA% is what is used to calculate your beers' IBU (bittering units). The acids are present in the hops in the form of resins and the reason for the long hop boils is to "break down" the resins (which are insoluable)known as Isomerization. Some hops are considered "bittering" hops because of the high percentage of AAUs, but many hops with double digit AAUs have desirable flavor and aroma profiles.

The flavor and aroma in hops are more from the oils present,which are volatile at high temperatures, so they are often added later in the boil/and or after the boil.

There is a lot more detailed chemistry involved, this is just a quicky overview. There is a great website that JoeChiante linked for me a long time ago, I think it is called BeerLegnds that has a ton of hop info.

This is a very helpful thread. I hope it's gets more info, and possibly stickied.

Okay so I have been following Fedora Dave's Groomsmen IPA thread and Mashani mentioned Mosaic hops so I tried to look them up a little.

The reviews/comments are all over the map it seems. I'm seeing piney, berry, citrus, woody descriptions right along side the totally love them / hate them opinions equally distributed.

So this is one that qualifies for how they are combined with other hops or when and how you use them to me.

Mashani posted on FD's thread that they might be a good selection if he was going to use the dark C malts for his IPA because of the berry with a pine background.

So my question here is how do you manipulate your hop selection to achieve one of the many flavor profiles it is represented as having?

If a hop can give me tropical fruit but also present pine and "cat pee" how does the brewer treat that hop to get the particular flavor profile it can potentially provide?

I have seen many comments about, in this particular hop, that it has to do with what other hop it is combined with so back to my OP which do you bitter with, which do you combine with and where would you add them (hop stand, 40 min. boil, dry hop etc.) ?

I recommend the book Hop Variety Handbook. It all depends how you use the hops. Long time in the boil most of the flavor is driven off. Make a hop tea or stand you are going to bitternes, flavor & aroma. Dry hop mainly aroma & flavor. Pick a hop or style and build your recipe around that.

Do not mind me I am a crazy cat person on drugs & alcohol!!!

MOSSAIC
Alpha Acid 11% - 13%
Beta Acid 3.2% - 3.8%
Cohumulone Acid 24% - 26%

Myrcene Oil 47% - 53%
Humulene Oil 13% - 16%
Caryophllene 5% - 8%

HaerBob. What is the point of boiling hops for 60 if flavor is driven off? I was trying to find hop that would accentuate in the witbeer recipe i was creating, but then I am led to believe that the point in that beer is to show off orange, coriander..??

This is a great thread and fits nicely with my grand Saison experiment. I am finding that using 4-6% AA hops (Saaz, Hallertau, etc) in a 20 minute boil with a gallon of water and a pound of DME, I am getting great bittering and flavor, at least in my samples. I think I have unknowingly been doing first wort hopping, cause after I get the water/dme mixed, I throw in the hops, and then turn on the heat, and it takes about 20 minutes to get to a boil, then I start the timer for the boil. So would what I've been doing be a 20 minute boil, or a 40 min (20 waiting for boil, 20 boiling)? Or just a FWH of a 20 boil?

Monty

haerbob3 wrote:I recommend the book Hop Variety Handbook. It all depends how you use the hops. Long time in the boil most of the flavor is driven off. Make a hop tea or stand you are going to bitternes, flavor & aroma. Dry hop mainly aroma & flavor. Pick a hop or style and build your recipe around that.

Do not mind me I am a crazy cat person on drugs & alcohol!!!

MOSSAIC
Alpha Acid 11% - 13%
Beta Acid 3.2% - 3.8%
Cohumulone Acid 24% - 26%

Myrcene Oil 47% - 53%
Humulene Oil 13% - 16%
Caryophllene 5% - 8%

@HB3 thanks for posting the data on the Mosaic.

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.

@Wollfy short answer: your wort is made from the sugars you are extracting from your grain bill (grist) so it is sweet; adding a bittering hop addition, which doesn't have to be a 60 minute boil, balances the final product (beer). As you learn to use QBrew you will see BU:GU (wort sweetness to hop bitterness ratio) change as you add or remove hops or grains in your recipes.
There is a link to the Beer Style Guideline towards the bottom of the forum index page it should help you design your Wit recipe and offer a guide for the BU:GU you want.

wollffy wrote:HaerBob. What is the point of boiling hops for 60 if flavor is driven off? I was trying to find hop that would accentuate in the witbeer recipe i was creating, but then I am led to believe that the point in that beer is to show off orange, coriander..??

You are boiling to grt the bitterness. @60 you get your bittering @20 or less you get flavors & aroma. When you brew a hop forward beer late hop additions & dry hopping are important. When designing a beer where other flavors are the star a single bittering charge to balance the malt sweetness is all you need. The beauty of homebrewing is brewing beer to your tastes.

monsteroyd wrote:This is a great thread and fits nicely with my grand Saison experiment. I am finding that using 4-6% AA hops (Saaz, Hallertau, etc) in a 20 minute boil with a gallon of water and a pound of DME, I am getting great bittering and flavor, at least in my samples. I think I have unknowingly been doing first wort hopping, cause after I get the water/dme mixed, I throw in the hops, and then turn on the heat, and it takes about 20 minutes to get to a boil, then I start the timer for the boil. So would what I've been doing be a 20 minute boil, or a 40 min (20 waiting for boil, 20 boiling)? Or just a FWH of a 20 boil?

Monty

Anytime your temps are 170+ you are going to get somewhat effective isomerization of the bittering compounds . +/- some depending on the actual wort PH. But basically you are effectively getting more then 20 minutes of bittering out of those hops. Isomerization is time/temperature/ph dependent reaction, it will happen at lower temps too given enough time. But enough time can be quite a lot when it's not hot.

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.

That's way more complicated than anything I would want to try but I found the info on Hopunions site about their extracts interesting.

I meant more along the lines of a "short boil gives you pine/citrus, a hop stand gives you spicey, dry hopping gives you floral" type things when you choose a certain variety for a particular character.

You posted on Kealia's pallette thread about tasting the melon, tropical fruit characters of Citrus while others pick up the grapefruit. I wonder if the answer is that it isn't how/where we add the hops but that we pick out/are more sensitive to one kind of product over the other.

For example I get the grapefruit in Citra from Citral, Nerol, Limonene whereas you get the floral/fruit from Linalool and Geraniol.

Yes, that's quite possible, everyone's taste buds and sense of smell is different. Some people think cilantro tastes like chewing on a bar of soap. I think it tastes great. Some people think certain hops smell like cat piss. I have cats and I smell cat piss all the time and to me personally those hops do not smell like cat piss, and in general I'm a fan of those hops.

FWIW, I think cascade tastes like grapefruit. But citra is totally different to me.

BB's what hop extracts are you looking at? I have used the Hopshot a couple of times. Even brewed an IPA that just used Hopshot as it's sole source of hops. Was very tasty, think I need to brew that this winter. Have a smack pac swelling up for a starter should be brewing in the next day or two!!

haerbob3 wrote:BB's what hop extracts are you looking at? I have used the Hopshot a couple of times. Even brewed an IPA that just used Hopshot as it's sole source of hops. Was very tasty, think I need to brew that this winter. Have a smack pac swelling up for a starter should be brewing in the next day or two!!

I wasn't looking to use extracts HB3 I just mentioned that I had read about them.

You know how it is when you can't brew and you brew in your head to make up for it. This is the part where I'm trying to pick which hop use.

I can't seem to leave good enough alone so if and when I'm able to get a good deal on 8 oz or a lb of hops, I grab them and then try to use them in test beers. Sometimes, I find it's not what I wanted.
Nugget is listed all over the place as a good bittering hop and the comment I kept reading was 'herbal, great for ales'. I tried it once so far and wasn't blown away like I expected. I guess what they describe as herbal, my friends and I describe as almost bubble gum. It's not at all bad but since I mixed them with other hops I likely got a contrast instead of a good twin to work with. When I use Nugget again, I'll definitely cut back on the amount used in bittering and maybe hit it with some at flame out. I don't think I'd like a SMaSH with all Nugget.
Some of my favorite beers use lots of Nugget such as our local Mechahopzilla and Green Flash Imperial IPA though I don't get any gum type flavors from them though I do get a slight herbal taste. I don't chew gum so maybe I don't know what to expect from these hops.