Celebration Question

Yeah, it sucks that you don't really know now if a beer was made exlusively with unkilned hops now that the terms are interchangeable.
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Doh! Just realized I necromanced last year's thread.

 

To answer the OP's question, in my opinion, Celebration's flavor changed two years ago, and for the worst (in my opinion). One of my beer buddies agrees with me too as we both loved it before the noticeable change. I'm not a customer of it anymore, but I still buy a couple of their other products!

 

I guess some might be over-thinking this, but do you like Celebration this year? I do. In fact, I Swanson giggled when I saw it in the LBS.

 

Most SN brews lack a great nose. I found this year's Celebration very spicy and less citrusy, but that's just to my palate.

 

Loved this year's Celebration, I believe it may be my favorite year. Been drinking it since 2004 I think too.

I think many go into it thinking of beers like Union Jack or Sculpin, it's not that kind of IPA.

 

Also besides the vast majority of beer drinkers, who don't pay such close attention to beer as the folk here do.

 

Wet hop = picking an apple from a tree and eating it the next day...fresh hop = an apple from an orchard front fruit stand...Hop Pellets = apple chips...all good ...all a bit different in their "appley-ness"

 

This is a good synopsis of our thinking. Nice work!

I occasionally use the analogy of spices as well. Wet Hop = oregano picked directly from your garden and used the same day. Fresh Hop = dried oregano from a new jar with the top just popped. Older hops and pellets = dried oregano from the jar that has been in the cabinet for a while. Just picked/undried oregano has a completely different flavor from the dried stuff. Similar, but different. Dried oregano can be more pungent of a flavor, but that flavor fades over time just like with any dried herb or plant. Can still be used for good effect, just different.

-Bill

 

Thanks for the contribution SNBill as always. It's great to have an employee post here.

So I was talking to a home brew guy the other day and he said something that didn't make sense to me and it's something you can maybe help with. He said if you are brewing with "wet" hops, you have to use 3 to 4 times the amount of hops compared to dried hops to get a similar hop flavor/aroma. Truth?

 

Actually, I thought of this exactly after I picked up this year's stock. Still delicious, but I know what you mean.

 

I had the same experience with Celebration. It was the first craft beer I had that sparked my interest in craft. I tried it on a recommendation by my private music instructor when I turned 21. I hated it at first because I wasn't prepared for the hop bitterness. I spent the next year trying every hop-forward beer I could find and by the time Celebration Ale hit shelves the next year, I was blown away. Total nostalgia in every bottle.

 

Keith, you do indeed need to use more of wet hops vs. dried hops since there is more water in the wet hop. What you are looking to obtain from the hops is the ‘good stuff’ like lupulin, alpha acids, essential oils, etc. The ‘extra’ water doesn’t really bring anything to the table. The rule of thumb is that 5-8 ounces of wet hops when they are dried will yield something like 1 ounce of dry hop; in other words you need to add more wet hops per hop addition to obtain similar effects from them.

As has already been discussed the character from wet hops will be different from dried hops. So while in brewing a beer you can use a selected ratio for a given hop addition (e.g., add 8 ounces of wet hop at the end of boil where you would typically add 1 ounce of dried hops) the relative effect will be the same but the character will be different.

In September I homebrewed a Harvest Ale using hops from my backyard. For my flavor addition I was trying to mimic ½ ounce of dried hops for my flavor addition (15 minutes remaining in the boil) so I used 4 ounces of wet hops for this addition (8 * 0.5 = 4) and for the aroma (end of boil) I was looking to mimic 1 ounce of dried hop so I used 8 ounces of wet hops. I was conservative in utilizing the higher end of 8 ounces of wet hops = 1 ounce of dried hops.

Cheers!

Jack

 

Ehhh...an apple at a farm market might have been picked a few days before (apples don't rot quite as fast as hops) but it has not been kilned at 140° temperatures resulting in a moisture content around 80% reduced to 10%.

I'll buy sierranevadabill's fresh/freshly dried/old dried herbs analogy, but not this one.

 

On the contrary, there's a ton of research that says human memory is incredibly bad at recalling actual facts, but we constantly trick ourselves into thinking we can remember them. That's why recently there have been a lot of old court cases being retried for guilty verdicts based eye-witness testimony that current DNA and other empirical evidence has proved is false. Not because the eye-witness lied about they anything, they believe what they think they saw, but it can be proven false.

So yeah, I'll take your 15-year old memory of Celebration with more than a grain of salt.

 

Thanks for the observation...perhaps I oversimplified a bit...

 

Let's all grab a Celeberation and discuss this further.

 

I had six of 'em last night while I was installing a new kitchen floor....couldn't have done it without them

 

Nice a 6 beer job is work! I always translate time to amount beer it takes to finish a home project. Can't do home projects without a good beer.

 

agreed. i can get 12 packs of celebration for $15.59 here in illinois. that's cheap!

 

Even better - full cases at Costco for $23.99