Are we wasting our time with whirlpool/hopstands?

malhal said:

So instead they might try to make some fake haze, e.g. by adding flour.

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WTF? Do breweries really do this? Breweries used to strive to get nice clear beer... are they seriously now "accidentally" brewing "too clear" beer that they have to add flour to it to make it deliberately hazy???

Or is this one of those "a guy down the pub told me..." kind of anecdotes?

Agentgonzo said:

WTF? Do breweries really do this? Breweries used to strive to get nice clear beer... are they seriously now "accidentally" brewing "too clear" beer that they have to add flour to it to make it deliberately hazy???

Or is this one of those "a guy down the pub told me..." kind of anecdotes?

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I'm reasonably confident that is a red herring. Certainly never heard of a brewery doing it.

Haze in NEIPAs is primarily created from the interaction between polyphenols in the hops adding as a dry hop and proteins in the beer.

Adding flour would not have the same effect.

The proteins that the polyphenols bind with are also not necessarily the same ones that get form the cold break. Even after the cold break there are plenty of proteins in the beer that contribute to mouthfeel and head retention. You can have a strong cold break and still get haze from heavy dry-hopping.

Many NEIPA breweries still use kettle finings to strip our unwanted proteins, which helps them achieve a stable haze.

Agentgonzo said:

WTF? Do breweries really do this? Breweries used to strive to get nice clear beer... are they seriously now "accidentally" brewing "too clear" beer that they have to add flour to it to make it deliberately hazy???

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I wouldn't doubt it. They *certainly* use a lot of unmalted wheat and oats which when not mashed properly contribute significantly to the starch load. I'm sure there are hundreds if not thousands of breweries in this category, whether they understand what they are doing or not.

If Guinness start off with a pale and then blend, I would say anything is possible.

Faking haze may be a bit strong, but, Wheat flour in the mash was certainly something you heard breweries experimented with back in the mid 2010s.

This article from 2016 does mention it.

https://grainfather.com/recipe/new-england-ipa-what-is-it/

Sadfield said:

Most of what I brew these days is British or Belgian in character. So, it's a flame out addition and straight to cooling. Hops should be on an equal billing with malt and yeast aromas, not dominating them.

Anything else is more early US craft inspired, where a 20' steep at sub 80°C will suffice.

A cavaet to all this is, I find layering hops throughout the process returns better results and less one dimensional beers. Whilst it won't satisfy the haze bros, it's telling that SN Pale ale has dominated the American craft market for 43 years without steeping or dry hopping. Just hops throughout the 90 minute boil.

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Good point and sort of supports me questioning this...Clearly SN uses dry hopping, and I have a whole load of other questions about dry hopping. Shame the turn around for a been is so long as I'd love to back to backs to test all sorts of things, but I cant brew every day let alone every week and sometimes you just want to brew a beer to enjoy!!

I guess I'm trying to understand the balance of brewing and production convenience and efficiency vs outcome. I've never really understood the point of late boil hop additions....I get you extract lower levels of bitterness..which is a less efficient use of hops as far as bitterness contributions are concerned...and not confined that much if any of the aromatics hang around to contribute a noticeable hop contribution even in a 5 minute addition. Seems to me a far more efficient process might be to add all your bittering hops at start of boil to maximise utilisation of the AA and reduce the amount of hops, and add all you aromatic hop additions either at a low temperature hopstand/whirlpool or just in your dry hop.

To counter this I've seen a couple of podcasts from brewers of NEIPA style beers who talk about hop oil saturation...the hypothesis being that you need to saturate the beer with hop oils and not just about adding a handful or so at various stages. They seem to say that by saturating the beer with the hop oils helps with the mouthfeel you want to accompany very highly hopped IPA's, avoid or minimise things like hop burn and to help with things like head retention, so in this case a whirlpool is just another opportunity to load the beer with hops to get more and more hop oils into the beer to support outragous levels of dry hop rates in excess of 20g/litre minimising all the harsh and unpleasant affects that high dry hop rates can produce. I guess if you can tsell beers for the price of these highly hopped NEIPA's then using more and more hops is less of an issue. A pretty niche part of the overall beer market granted, but gets you thinking about how the many different ways different techniques impact be impacting your beer.

Another brewery that springs to mind is Dogfishhead who constantly adds hops through the whole boil process at a specific rate like x grams per minute or so through the entire boil and made a dosing machine to constantly drop hops into the kettle during the boil. Clearly they come from a time when there were the 'bitterness' wars going on with the new US breweries trying to outdo outdo with ever more bitter hoppy beers.

hoppyscotty said:

Clearly SN uses dry hopping,

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Not in SN Pale.

hoppyscotty said:

Another brewery that springs to mind is Dogfishhead who constantly adds hops through the whole boil process at a specific rate like x grams per minute or so through the entire boil and made a dosing machine to constantly drop hops into the kettle during the boil. Clearly they come from a time when there were the 'bitterness' wars going on with the new US breweries trying to outdo outdo with ever more bitter hoppy beers.

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An erroneous assertion. Surely, if bitterness was the objective using all those hops at the start of the boil would produce more IBUs, than continual dosage.

From their website.

"Brewed using a boatload of intense Northwest hops, we boil this continually hopped IPA for a full 60 minutes, adding more than 60 hop additions continuously to create a bold and timeless flavor. Continually hopped to deliver a pungently, citrusy, grassy hop flavor without being crushingly bitter, 60 Minute IPA is a surprisingly sessionable IPA for the craft enthusiast."

It is clearly about the character of flavour. There's four aspects to hopping: antimicrobial properties, bitterness to balance malt sweetness, flavour and aroma.

From reading the various approaches in you post, the one that sticks out most is hop oil saturation. My understanding is it comes from Shellhammer's research that hop oil saturation is reached at c8g/L dry hop, so hopping above that is ineffective and adds vegetal aroma, not that you should be trying to saturated the beer with more oils to add body. Being deficient in body prior to dry hopping is surely a fault with the recipe or process, no?

I'd say the bitterness war is a modern myth. Largely what happened regarding bitterness, is Lupolin Threshold Shift, where exposure to hoppy beers increases tolerance to bitter flavours over time. The market perceived beers getting less bitter, and a few breweries adjusting their recipes, but WCIPA IBUs have largely stayed the same, often less than in Imperial Stouts or Barleywines. An exception was Mikkeller (not American) and I few others, experimenting with theoretical IBUs, making a 1000ibu beer. It wasn't anything outragious, as the human threshold is around 100 IBUs.

Are we seeing an aroma war?

I never know if SN = Shepherd Neame or SN = Sierra Nevada…

Caramel Ox said:

I never know if SN = Shepherd Neame or SN = Sierra Nevada…

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The latter.

Caramel Ox said:

I never know if SN = Shepherd Neame or SN = Sierra Nevada…

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Scottish and Newcastle.

Sadfield said:

Scottish and Newcastle.

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I thought it unlikely to be Shepherd Neame or Scottish & Newcastle given they are mostly traditional beers & not associated with hop juice

Sadfield said:

Not in SN Pale.


An erroneous assertion. Surely, if bitterness was the objective using all those hops at the start of the boil would produce more IBUs, than continual dosage.

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Not an assertion...that is literally what they did. Straight from the horses mouth. In their very early days they used a kids football game that featured a vibrating pitch so the players moved around (I had a similar game as a child too) and used that vibrating plate to try to create a consistent dosing rate through the length of the boil by angling the vibrating plate down on a shallow angle and dropping hops at the top so the vibration spreads the hop pellets out evenly as they travel down the length of the plate. As they got bigger they designed and had made a more professional piece of equipment to do the job.

Whether they still use this method is another question, but for sure in their early days that is exactly what they did.

Found the video I saw it on:



I guess its probably only dropping in a few hops a second or so such that the total hops dropped in over the period of the boil is similar, or probably lower amount, to what you might drop in for a more conventional boil hopping scheduled for the same level of IBU.

As an aside I was on a 'beer research' weekend in Leeds over the weekend and took in a Brewery Tour of North Brewery. Though the guide was not a member of the brewing team he seemed to have a pretty good knowledge of the brewing process and how its done at North. They had a separate whirlpool vessel and I specifically asked if they cooled the wort before sending it to the Whirlpool vessel and he was pretty sure they didn't, just sent straight from the kettle. He could always be wrong of course, and maybe if you're using a separate whrilpool vessel that kind of does it in a continual flow process rather than steeping the whole volume (as far as I understand it at least) then maybe the alpha acids dont have the time to isomerise before the wort goes through the chiller after the whirlpool vessel, or maybe the wort does cool down sufficiently during the transfer from the kettle...who knows.

hoppyscotty said:

Not an assertion...that is literally what they did. Straight from the horses mouth. In their very early days they used a kids football game that featured a vibrating pitch so the players moved around (I had a similar game as a child too) and used that vibrating plate to try to create a consistent dosing rate through the length of the boil by angling the vibrating plate down on a shallow angle and dropping hops at the top so the vibration spreads the hop pellets out evenly as they travel down the length of the plate. As they got bigger they designed and had made a more professional piece of equipment to do the job.

Whether they still use this method is another question, but for sure in their early days that is exactly what they did.

Found the video I saw it on:



I guess its probably only dropping in a few hops a second or so such that the total hops dropped in over the period of the boil is similar, or probably lower amount, to what you might drop in for a more conventional boil hopping scheduled for the same level of IBU.

As an aside I was on a 'beer research' weekend in Leeds over the weekend and took in a Brewery Tour of North Brewery. Though the guide was not a member of the brewing team he seemed to have a pretty good knowledge of the brewing process and how its done at North. They had a separate whirlpool vessel and I specifically asked if they cooled the wort before sending it to the Whirlpool vessel and he was pretty sure they didn't, just sent straight from the kettle. He could always be wrong of course, and maybe if you're using a separate whrilpool vessel that kind of does it in a continual flow process rather than steeping the whole volume (as far as I understand it at least) then maybe the alpha acids dont have the time to isomerise before the wort goes through the chiller after the whirlpool vessel, or maybe the wort does cool down sufficiently during the transfer from the kettle...who knows.

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WTF are you on about?

Yes, that's HOW they continually hopped their IPA, but they weren't doing to get high IBUs. They say exactly that in the first minute of the video, that they wanted a pungent IPA without it being crushingly bitter.

hoppyscotty said:

Clearly they come from a time when there were the 'bitterness' wars going on with the new US breweries trying to outdo outdo with ever more bitter hoppy beers.

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Your assertion that there was a competition, an IBU war, to make beers more bitter is complete BS, and that video proves it. Thanks.

Sadfield said:

Your assertion that there was a competition, an IBU war, to make beers more bitter is complete BS, and that video proves it. Thanks.

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There definitely was an IBU war going on throughout the USA for a couple decades, with theoretical IBUs being reported all over the place, and especially where they used the Rager formula which tends to inflate the IBU far beyond reality, they'd be reporting values of 200, 300, 400, 1000 IBUs, or stupid stuff like that. This IBU war gradually ended over the course of 10-15 years which seems to be about how long it took for all brewers to realize that actual lab measurements proved a practical ceiling of around 90 IBUs in finished beer, so the previous IBU reports were all false of course. In the meantime, brewers developed dozens of different ways of adding hops to result in a broad range in bitterness, flavor, and aroma of highly hopped beers, which they still claim gave/gives their particular beer unique qualities, which is largely untrue. Once they discovered Simcoe, Citra, and Mosaic, we got stuck with every APA and IPA tasting about the same in the USA, regardless of IBUs.

dmtaylor said:

There definitely was an IBU war going on throughout the USA for a couple decades, with theoretical IBUs being reported all over the place, and especially where they used the Rager formula which tends to inflate the IBU far beyond reality, they'd be reporting values of 200, 300, 400, 1000 IBUs, or stupid stuff like that. This IBU war gradually ended over the course of 10-15 years which seems to be about how long it took for all brewers to realize that actual lab measurements proved a practical ceiling of around 90 IBUs in finished beer, so the previous IBU reports were all false of course. The result is that brewers developed dozens of different ways of adding hops to result in a broad range in bitterness, flavor, and aroma of highly hopped beers. Then eventually along came Simcoe, Citra, and Mosaic, and now we're stuck with every APA and IPA tasting about the same in the USA, regardless of IBUs.

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There wasn't. Bitterness and high number IBUs were never the objective. They were all trying to make hoppier beers, not more bitter beers. That war is easily won by only using one massive addition at the start of the boil. Common sense would tell you that. There was never a bitterness war, just coincidental bitterness from adding hops.

Watch the DogFishHead video posted previously, they clearly say from the start they were trying to add more hops, without bitterness.

Sadfield said:

There wasn't. Bitterness and high number IBUs were never the objective. They were all trying to make hoppier beers, not more bitter beers. That war is easily won by only using one massive addition at the start of the boil. Common sense would tell you that. There was never a bitterness war, just coincidental bitterness from adding hops.

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Then I don't know why thousands of brewers reported stupid-high IBUs on their beers for many many years. I guess my real life experience consuming beer in the USA for the past 30 years, and brewing for 25, is invalid.

EDIT: You have a point I guess. The IBU rubbish is a coincidental result of adding buttloads of hops near the end of the boil. Which again, like I said, if/when Rager was used (it was widely used for quite a while), it inflated the IBUs to make it seem like the beer was more hoppy than it might have actually tasted, compared with today's standards of flavor and aroma, vice bitterness.

If you wanted to out do your competitors with bitterness, early over late additions would do that. History had shown that hop additions in IPAs have gone the opposite way since the 1800's. Later and later in the process.

jof said:

I thought it unlikely to be Shepherd Neame or Scottish & Newcastle given they are mostly traditional beers & not associated with hop juice

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Apparently Scottish & Newcastle did use a hop once. Just one