Hoppy Beer Makes Me Happy

A hop plant is a type of flower. When the flower is dried and added to beer, hops provide bitterness and aroma. Why do we want beer to be bitter? Because the sweetness of the malt in wort is overwhelming. Without hops, having a beer would be like drinking pancake syrup. Well, maybe not that bad. But you get the picture. All good things in life require balance, and beer is no exception.

Obviously, this is too simplistic of a view. Different styles of beer come in a wide range of hopping levels. Wheat Beers are typically lightly hopped. By style, wheat beer is 10-15 IBU. On the other hand, an India Pale Ale is 40-60 IBU. And this is only a consideration of flavoring hops. IBU is roughly a function of how long hops are boiled in relationship to the alpha acid present in a given hops variety.

Taking the same pale ale recipe with 10 pounds of 2 row barley, one ounce of flavoring hops, a one hour boil, and 75 percent system efficiency, I can achieve an IBU of 14 IBU by using Saaz (3.75 alpha) as my flavoring hop. If I switch to Galena using just one ounce( (13 alpha), my IBU's jump to a hophead's nirvana: nearly fifty.

If you are used to drinking Miller/Bud/Coors, just switching from Saaz to Galena will be like moving from the merry-go-round to the roller coaster.

Common flavoring hops include: Saaz or Hallertauer (3-5), Kent Goldings or Tettnanger (4-6), Cascade (5-7), Perle (7-9), Northern Brewer (7-10), Centennial (9-12), and Nugget or Chinook (11-13).

So far, we've talked about flavoring hops. Another new world is presented by aromatic hops, which are added near the end of the boil or even after the wort has cooled (dry hopping). Little or no bitterness is added to the wort because the boil extracts the bitterness.

Common aromatic hops include: Cascade (citrus, grapefruit), Challenger (fruity), East Kent Goldings and Tettnanger (spicy), Fuggles, Saaz, and Hallertauer (mild, grassy, herbal), Hops come in a variety of forms. Most new homebrewers start out using pellets. Pellets are advantageous because they are conveniently packaged and widely available. However, pellets turn to powder and do not providea nice filtering base.

Loose hops and plugs (which become loose when hydrated) float and provide a nice filtering basis. It's also easier to siphon underneath the floating hops. Mostly

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