101 - hops...creating a recipe

This is for those of us that haven't been brewing very long and want to make their own recipe or tweak an existing recipe.  As in pretty much all of life, nothing described in something this short can be completely true and accurate...but it'll do for the 10,000 foot view.

Hops are used for three things in brewing: bitterness, flavor and aroma...and this is the cool part -> YOU get to decide how you're using the hops simply by choosing WHEN you put them in your kettle.

There are only three things to remember:

• Hops boiled a long time contribute a lot of bitterness, a bit of flavor, and no aroma.
• Hops boiled a short time contribute a little bitterness, a lot of flavor, and some aroma.
• Hops boiled for a very short time or not boiled at all add no bitterness, some flavor, and a lot of aroma.

So imagine this...you're going to boil your wort for 60 minutes.

1. At 60 minutes, you add hops for bitterness.
2. After 40 minutes (what we call 20 minutes left to boil) you add the hops for flavor
3. At flameout, you add the hops for aroma.

At it's simplest, it's pretty much just that easy.

Now...a little jargon (but, trust me, cool jargon).

Malt makes the beer sweet, hops make the beer bitter.  Every style is, among other things, a balancing act between the malt and the hops (and the yeast, but that's another subject entirely).  An AIPA (American India Pale Ale) has, relatively speaking, a lot of bitterness.  An Irish red, comparatively, has a lot of sweetness.  You're going to control the bitterness AND the balance of your beer by choosing and using hops appropriately.

When you buy hops, they'll be labeled with an AA%.  This stands for the percent of the hops that are alpha acids...the primary source of bitterness.  When you boil the hops for 60 minutes, you're going to release all that bitterness into your beer.

Different hop varieties have different tastes AND different amounts of alpha acids. Crystal hops, for example, usually have between 2 and 4% AA...and I have some Warrior hops in the fridge that are 18% AA.

So think about this...if you want a beer that's as bitter as 1 ounce of Warrior hops would make it...but you're using 3% AA Crystal hops...then it stands to reason that you'd need 6 ounces, right?  1 ounce of 18%AA = 6 ounces of 3%AA...make sense?

The amount of bitterness in the beer is known as IBU...the International Bitterness Units.  The amount of perceived bitterness in your beer is the BR...the Bitterness Ratio (the balance thing we were talking about above).  We'll discuss BR another time.

Just to give you an idea, the American Lagers that everyone knows have, maybe 10 IBUs...and an Imperial IPA might have 100 IBU.

Calculating IBUs with a pencil and paper is pretty complicated, but for the mathematical masochists among us, here are a couple formulas from the homebrew wiki.  In practice, we don't do that.  We go online or to our phones and pull up an IBU calculator from someone like Brewer's Friend.

An Example: a nice Scottish or Irish Ale.

(follow along with me here...pop open another window on the IBU calculator and use it in the recipe below...it's easy)

You just went into the Nine Brothers Irish Pub and had a Smithwicks...and you loved it....an outstanding beer!  Someone tells you itś an Irish Ale....you can hardly wait to make your own Irish Ale....so lets go!

We know for this style that we're looking for 20-30 IBU and little hops flavor (check any beer style guide for that info).  We have some nice Kent Goldings hops at the local home brew store and the package says 5.0% AA.

So we plug into the calculator an average wort density (what we call OG, original gravity, but more on this in a subsequent investigation)...let's say 1.050 and 2 ounces of hops boiled 60 minutes....the calculator says 42 IBU...WOAH...too much!  That'll be way too bitter for what we're trying to make...dial it back a bit...put in 1 ounce...says 21 IBU...ok, just right.

So when we make our beer, we'll use one hop addition...60 minutes before the end of the boil and we'll add 1 ounce of Kent Goldings.

Now, we could stop right there and be just fine....but why not fancy it up bit?  Just to show off.

We'll give it just a bit more hops flavor but no bitterness (remember our rule? that means short boil)......go to the calculator....let's try 1/4 ounce for the last 20 minutes....calculator says that'll add 2.9 IBUs....21 IBUs (from the 1 ounce at 60 minutes) + 2.9 IBUs is about 24 IBU...still well in the range of our desired style.

Now we know we're going to throw an ounce of Kent Goldings in when the boil starts, boil it for 40 minutes, throw in 1/4 ounce of Kent Goldings and boil 20 more minutes.

So - that's how that's done...pretty easy actually...a couple times through and it'll be second nature.