13
Usually the pellets will dissolve during boil and settle down to the bottom of your kettle when you cool your wort. Then, when transferring to the fermentor you can just leave them behind (easier to do with a siphon).
Or
Use a hop bag - put the pellets on the bag, when you are done with the boil simply pull the bag out.
12
I started creating my own recipes by picking a beer that I liked and then trying to brew something close to the commercial example. This is not a bad way to start, since you have a concrete goal that you are trying to achieve. And it can be very educational, since it will teach you a lot about the ingredients that commercial brewers use and in what ...
9
The hop pellets are not supposed to dissolve into your wort. Rather, the boiling isomerizes the alpha acids in the hops (and the isomerized alpha acids will dissolve into the wort), giving the wort its intended bitterness. However, it is totally normal to get an "oil slick", film or foam of hops on top of the boiling wort.
Hops have three purposes: ...
9
Could you use less hops, or add them 10 minutes later in the boil? There are lots of hops that are less bitter (weight for weight), but whether they are a good fit depends upon the recipe.
Sorry this isn't directly answering your question, but I think you can get what you are looking for (less bitterness) without having to substitute.
9
I happened to have "The homebrewer's companion" on my desk when I read your question, so I quickly checked in it, and it says the following:
Recently the German Society of Hop Research has recognized the
important potential of hop flavor and aroma in their document "New
Trends in Hop Breeding." The German Society of Hop Reserch identifies
key hop ...
8
Well the main way you learn how to make your own recipes is by picking ingredients out kind of at random at first, kind of like a kid in a kitchen. The problem with this is that your first couple of custom recipes are unlikely to be very good. Here's my advice....
Start off with proven recipes. This means stuff out of 'Brewing Classic Styles' or recipes ...
8
I've recently done the experiment. Zero boil hops, but dry-hopped with 6 ounces of high alpha acid hops (Summit, Simcoe and Apollo). This brew is quite bitter, whatever the reason, and it is of the same "kind" of bitterness one would expect from hopping in the boil and not particularly astringent.
8
I use a bucket for my fermentor so I bought a steel mesh strainer. I then sanitize the strainer with starsan and place the strainer across the top of the bucket and run the wort through it. This strains out the hop gunk and helps with aeration by turning the wort into droplets as it falls into the fermentor.
8
Generally, a beer created without the use of hops is called a 'gruit' or 'grut'. 'Gruit' (or 'grut') can also be the term used for the mixture of spices working as a bittering agent in the beer.
Some herbs commonly used in gruit:
sweet gale
mugwort
yarrow
ivy
horehound
heather
juniper
ginger
aniseed
carraway
and really, anything else a gruit producer ...
8
Absolutely not a problem. You will gain just a bit of extra bitterness by boiling longer, but so little that I doubt you could notice it.
8
The term "Bill": be it grain or hops is simply the list of that type of ingredient, weight and time or stage schedule and how it's applied to the recipe.
Sample:
2oz Galaxy FWH
( weight, ingredient, added to kettle allowing the first wort of the sparge to mix with the hops, hops stay in for full duration of the boil)
Yes all beers have a grain and hop ...
7
If you are siphoning your beer out of a flat bottom kettle/pot a whirlpool can be very effective.
After you are done chilling put your brew pot in the location that you plan to siphon from. Using a clean and sanitized spoon stir that wort up into a good vortex. Once the whirlpool has started, remove the spoon and replace the lid.
Then go about cleaning ...
7
For some hands on learning with less effort required than brewing several SMASH batches, you can dry hop some bland beer as explained here. I did not write that nor have I tried it yet but it looks like an interesting experiment.
7
Not in particular. I've compiled one from multiple sources, both paper and digital, for http://brew-journal.com/hops/.
http://homebrewtalk.com/wiki/index.php/Hops is one of the better sources. https://byo.com/resources/hops too, but poor ui. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hop_varieties of course has an article that's suprisingly complete, except ...
7
There are plenty of online IBU calculators that will help you out, such as this one.
The recipe calls for adding 4 ounces with 15 minutes left in the boil, and 3.75 at flameout. Assuming the flameout addition adds no bitterness, we still have to calculate the IBU contributions from the 15 minute addition. Let's assume these AA percentages:
Simcoe: 13
...
7
Citra is a good bet for grapefruit aromas. Check this link for a nice tool to help with hopping your beers
https://www.hopunion.com/aroma-wheel/
7
Alpha acids, pleasant bitterness you want in your beer, are in inactive form in hops. They need to be isomerized to taste the way it should. This takes time and temperature, around an hour of boil to convert all of it.
Aromatic components of hops needs only to be washed out. But they degenerate and evaporate with boil, so the shorter you keep them hot, the ...
7
Interestingly, I found a presentation by Thomas H. Shellhammer, professor of fermentation science at OSU, that shows the composition of a typical hop cone:
Cellulose and Lignin: 40-50%
Protein: 15%
Alpha Acids: 2-15%
Beta Acids: 2-10%
Water: 8-12%
Minerals: 8%
Polyphenols and Tannins: 3-6%
Lipids and Fatty Acids: 1-5%
Hop Oil: 0.5-3%
Monosaccharides: 2%
...
7
What they're referring to is a process called "dry hopping", which is used to promote hop aroma and flavor in the beer. It's very common and has been in use for hundreds of years. You don't need to worry about contamination from the hops for several reasons...first, hops were originally used for their antibacterial properties. Second, after fermentation ...
7
From Brewtarget (brewing software):
Mash hopping: adding hop in the mash
First wort: adding hop in the boiling kettle and then lautering the wort in the kettle
Boil: Adding hop when the wort boils, at different times
Aroma: apparently adding hops after flameout, also called hop stand
Dry hop of course, which is for someone who starts with brewing rather ...
7
According to the American homebrewer's association, there are 3 main techniques to dry out your hops:
Food dehydrator
Using a food dehydrator is the easiest way to dry out your hops as it ensures air movement but does not get excessively hot.
Well-ventilated oven
You can use your oven to dry your hops by spreading them out on a pan. You will need to ...
6
You can simply half the hops for a half sized recipe. Although hop utilization is non linear, at these boil sizes the difference is negligible compared to other factors, such as alpha-acids lost due to aging.
For flavor and aroma hops, their contribution is also related to batch size and quantity of hops, so again, these can be simply scaled in proportion ...
6
The BJCP Guidelines give recommended hopping levels for most styles. The amount of bitterness is expressed as International Bittering Units (IBU). The IBU rating for a beer is a function of: quantity of hops, bitterness of hops (alpha acid percentage), boil time, and gravity and volume of wort. There are lots of good IBU calculators on the web. Google for ...
6
If your recipe is written as one once by weight, which I can't think of any reason why it shouldn't be. You should be fine with dry hopping and late additions. So as long as the pellets are the flavor you are going for you should be fine.
I dry hop all the time with pellets and I don't use bags or strainers and I get excellent flavor and no haze problems.
6
Yes, you are missing a more obvious method..just throw them in the secondary! You don't need to do anything at all to sanitize them and doing something could have negative effects on the quality of the hops. I have dry hopped many, many batches of beer with my home grown hops and infection has never happened due to it. As another example, Rogue has its ...
6
Even if you can't identify the strain, you can try using the cones to brew test batches, to see if it's any good as bittering hops, aroma or flavor. I did this with a batch of random "ornamental" hops, and liked the results enough to try to cultivate them.
6
Something I've read somewhere and tried myself with a degree of success is this technique:
Go out and buy a six pack of the most bland beer you know of in whatever style you desire (I've used But Light for a lighter beer, but not experimented with darkers). At this point you will need to sanitize the hops (you can probably freeze for more of a dry hopping,...
6
You've made your bed of hops, now lay in it.
Now is not the time to be messing about in your fermenter. Or, frankly, opening it up to take pictures of it. The beer is very susceptible to infection right now. Your massive dose of hops might be a little protective, but you can only get so much alpha acid in your beer, so you haven't made some super-immune ...
6
Raising the mash above 78 C generally runs the risk of extracting polyphenols, which will add astringency to your beer.
Additionally you'll extract other compounds that will make having a clear product more challenging.
Boiling with grains can be done if your boiling a small portion of your mash and returning it to increase the temperature of the overall ...
5
I've had bitter hop flavor come from dry hopping as well.
The quoted text from the OP makes sense to me:
Dry hopping is essentially creating a tincture. Don't believe me? Drop 3 grams of a high alpha hop in a liter of vodka and come back in a month, chose something fruity and popular like mosaic or galaxy. 3 grams is toughly equal to 2 oz in a 5 gallon ...
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