Gravity - effects on aroma and flavour?

Higher gravity = less hop effect...so you usually need more hops in a bigger beer to get the same hoppiness as you would in a lower gravity beer. Once you reach a certain ABV (around 10-11%), it seems that hops really fall off and are harder to get a real hoppy flavor and aroma...it seems that hops contribute mainly just bitterness in higher ABV beers. That's why most "triple IPA's" end up with little hoppiness and are closer to a barleywine than anything else.

 

This includes dry hopping? If so, is it a case that the hop essential oils have difficulty in being extracted/dissolved in higher alcohol beers?

Cheers!

 

More alcohol should theoretically dissolve more hop oils. But I suspect @DrMindbender is referring to hops having to compete with stronger non-hop flavors in bigger beers.

 

Imo best hoppy brews are below 7abv. Everybody has different tastes but I can make a 6.5 IPA which smells and tastes great, boost it up to 8 and it's no wear near as good.

 

You can try it and see, but for aroma,flavor additions I prefer 5 min FO, whirlpool and dry hopping additions. Boiling separate then adding I have no clue.

 

FWIW: Mitch Steele made an intersting claim that lower abv tends to pull more "grassy flavors" from hops, while higher abv pulls less grassy flavors (so more fruity and citrus) from hops. If he is correct, I'd assume its because the higher alcohol is a more efficient solvent for the extraction of the hop oils themselves. In my crude anecdotal sampling experience, I agree that session ipa's tend to be more grassy while ipa's in the 6.8% - 7.2% range tend to be less grassy than those session ipa's.

 

Why do you think you should treat hops differently because you are brewing with extract? I don't think there should be any concern for doing anything different using extract vs all grain. Just like @GormBrewhouse mentioned...if you want more hoppiness as far as flavor and aroma, up your amounts or add in a late boil addition, flameout addition, do a hopstand or whirlpool and a nice big dry hop never hurts. Adding extract at different times of the boil won't affect much, except the color/SRM.

 

Maltiness/sweetness is a counterbalancing act with hops and bitterness. Taste an OG wort gravity sample and then a finished higher gravity beer. The alcohol in the high gravity beer will help mitigate some of the sweetness...unless it is underattenuated, then nothing will help

I would differentiate between high OG beers and high FG beers...but hop boil utilization is always less with big beers (high gravity wort)

 

I was just listening to the podcast experimental brewing and they talked about the concept that wort with higher levels of proteins inhibit hop oil extraction. Thus, bigger beers have less hop utilization due to the proteins and not alcohol, however, because higher alcohol beers have a higher gravity it impacts hops.

 

In their interview with Glen Tinseth, he insinuated, I think, that this effect would be greater on whole flower hops than pelletized hops because the latter disperse more readily in the wort. He was talking about ibu extraction, but the concept of a physical barrier that prevents hop-wort interaction seemingly would also apply to aromatic extracts.

 

I'm not sure if this is true. Some of the most aroma forward IPAs on the market have high protein adjuncts. I would love to see an experiment utilizing two grists, one with flaked adjuncts, and one without.

 

It blew everyone's mind to learn than glen's whole ibu calculation is based on whole cone hops.

@SFACRKnight
They talked about doing an experiment with varies wort gravities and the same hopping then testing them in the lab to see what effects it may have.

The NE IPA trend is all about high levels of protein and they are all very hoppy.

 

It shouldn't have, but apparently this has confused some people for years. One of the first things I noticed when I started building brewing spreadsheets was that my implementation of the Tinseth formula was getting a slightly different answer than many (most?) of the calculators at the time. It was because they were assuming pellet hops as the baseline and applying a utilization penalty for leaf, rather than assuming leaf hops as the baseline and applying a utilization bonus for pellets. It helps to RTFM.

 

@drewbage do you have any links to the protein study?

 

The information that proteins (break material) in wort will affect utilization has been around for a while. This is about less IBUs, not less aroma.

 

Not completely blown away. Some IBUs calculators have pellet or whole hop adjustment factors. We knew it mattered. I assumed that folks who incorporated his work into calculators accounted for this.

 

Sorry if I presented this as truth. Definitely hypothesis, not confirmed.

Proteins are obviously a highly complex and infinitely diverse group of compounds; there is likely a better measure than total protein in wort or beer. Think about the physical barriers idea, it may have more to do with proteins that precipitate out of solution (break material) than that which remains dissolved