Hop combos experiments.

[Braufather]

Thinking of stating a series of hop paring to get a feel Of what hops work best for me, and splitting batches to compare more quickly. However this would mean I can only experiment in the dry hop- do people think this will limit what I can learn from it? It would be low bitterness with mainly Late additions on the main hop, to highlight hop flavour and aroma. yeast would be s05 us each time for consistency too.

So for example I will essentially brew a smash with simcoe , then split it and dry hop with amarrillo in one batch, and citra in another. Then next time repeat with two different dry hops. After doing this a few times with simcoe I’d then move on to another base hop?

im also wondering, given equal quantities used, how different simcoe smash Dry hopped with amarrillo woukd be from an amarrillo smash dry hopped with simcoe?

has anyone else played around with this? It seems like I’ve made 40 odds brews but I haven’t learnt much as normally I follow a recipe and they are all different. Made some good(and bad) beer but don’t have any real insight of what works really well together. I mainly Brew pales and ipas of various descriptions.

 

[Madhouse]

I should probably do this. What I tend to do is go in at the deep end and see what happens.

Made a good DDH WC IPA the other day as there was a Thornbridge twitter post and that's what my beer style came out as, thought "I'd drink that!" so looked up the style and a few recipes for ideas and ended up using Simcoe, Cascade, Mosaic, Centennial and Citra at various times & quantities - definitely making that again!! Also have a plan for the next brew (hopefully this weekend) which is based on Verdant's Even Sharks Need Water but all the hops will be English varieties as I read somewhere there was a surplus (Magnum, Olicana and Jester) - not used Olicana and Jester before so I'm going solely on what the info sheet says!

Flip side is my alcoholic root beer may be a bit rubbish.

 

[Braufather]

I know, That’s what I’ve been doing thus far too so trying to get a bit more understanding going!

 

[Madhouse]

Definitely a good idea in order to really get to know what a hop variety tastes like. You could also apply the same theory to yeasts too.

 

[Braufather]

gonna do that too, but not at same time. There’s just not enough brewing days in the week!

 

[Madhouse]

You're certainly not going to be short of beer to brew for a good while!

 

[TheDaysy]

I'm doing something similar experimenting with smash beers doing a brew every week and changing one thing each time to see how it affects flavour but the big problem I'm having is that I don't know how the last experiment has gone when I'm brewing the next one

 

[MmmBeer]

I did something similar a couple of years ago. I made a couple of SMASH's, cascade and centennial if I remember correctly, then blended them in the glass until I got to my preferred ratio.

Then I took things further and bought a few single hop pales and attempted blending them in the same way with my SMASH's. Things got a bit messy that night, and my tasting notes start to get a bit hazy towards the end, but it was fun.