How much aroma hop to use?

an ounce for 5 gallons is sort of a nominal level. The reason to add more is an attempt to capture more of the volatile oils and increase the hop flavor/aroma. One could argue about the effectiviness and what the overall level of solubility is.

Regardless, start with 1-2 ounces, see how you like it and if you want more, increase it next time!

 

You can add a surprisingly large amount of late or flameout hops and wind up with tasty beer. At first I was cautious, but now I'm not so cautious. Almost all of my beers get at least an ounce of late or flameout hops, although sometimes these are milder hops than others. For instance, I used this hops schedule on my petite saison smash and it came out perfect:

• 1 oz fuggles at 60
• 1 oz fuggles at 15
• 1 oz fuggles at 5
• 1 oz fuggles at 0

Just keep in mind, those are fuggles hops, which aren't real powerfully flavored, and don't have a high AA%. If those were citra hops, the beer would have been COMPLETELY different.
My Pliny pseudo-clone had 3 oz bittering hops, and six ounces of flameout hops, plus two four ounce additions of dry hops, and it came out great too (barfdiggs's hop schedule suggestion!).
However, my oatmeal stout I just made did not have any flameout hops, and nothing later than a 20 minute addition.
Experiment, try different amounts. You'll see that you actually have quite a bit of leeway in much of what you'll brew.

 

Here is an excellent article that addresses many of your concerns. I found it helpful and regularly use 3-4 ounces late additions plus DH. Ultimately your experience will tell you which variety of hops you prefer, with the goal of building layers of flavors.
http://www.mrmalty.com/late_hopping.php

 

Have you ever had Stone IPA? Do you think that beer has ‘adequate’ hop aroma? The Stone folks provided recipes for homebrewers to clone there beers. In the clone for Stone IPA they list a total of 1.5 ounces for dry hopping.

You can read more here:http://www.stonebrew.com/news/081201/

Cheers!

 

Surprised no one has brought this up, but when determining the weight of hops to use for aroma, you also have to take into account variety, age, and quality. For instance, everything else being equal 1oz of citra will give you much more aroma than 1oz of Willamette, this year's harvest of citra will be more potent than last years, and citra of a similar age that has been in a vacuum packed bag in the freezer will be better than some that was in a Ziploc in the fridge.

 

I'm with Al on this. I used to be skeptical about adding too much in my late hop additions, however after experimenting with pale ales, saisons, and recently a kolsch, I've become rather heavy handed with my hops additions. My first american pale read like this:
.75 oz magnum @ 60
.5oz citra @ 20
.5oz citra @ 5
1oz dryhop
And it worked out well, tasted great, did well in competition. The red I'm brewing up next weekend looks like this:
.5oz magnum @ 60
.5oz chinook @ 30
1oz citra @ 10
.5pz chinook @ 10
1oz centennial@ 5
1oz chinook @5
1oz centennial and chinook @ flameout
1oz citra and chinook dryhop.
I hopped my last ipa the same way and its been my best beer yet. Unfortunately some brett got into that one and cut its life short. I guess what I'm getting at is that I am happily carpetbombing my hoppy beers in the last 15 minutes of the boil and getting great results.

 

WARNING: this post may contain rambling, delusions of grandeur, and/or wild speculation. Read at your own risk.


*************************************************

I was gonna say, that's a pretty hoppy red, almost IPA-like.

I think I'm gonna do a second attempt at Al's Red-eye ale, which was an extract red ale that wound up being quite hoppy, and quite tasty too! That was probably the first beer where I really "got it" on the "moar hops" theory of hopping. My early attempts used a quite cautious approach, as I mentally assigned more flavor/bittering potential to all hops in general. Sometimes the precautionary principle is too cautious.

The root of my under-hopping at first was twofold: I hadn't learned enough about specific hops varieties yet, and I was not adjusting flavor and bittering quantities for the type of hops used. Understandable for a noob, I see this frequently now from other noobs when they post recipes.

For instance, willamette, serebrianka and fuggles are all hops that you can practically just dump them in by the handful (if they're LEAF, that is, don't try this with pellet hops!). These hops don't have real strong flavor potential, and typically aren't high in alpha acid content either. My first smash was under-hopped, as I used 2.5oz willamette TOTAL for the beer. Nowadays the only thing I might use only 2.5 ounces of willamette for would be something like a saison or a wheat beer, where you basically don't want much hops at all. However, I've even added more than this in a wheat beer, with no ill effects. Batch II of elderberry wheat used two ounces fuggles, batch III used three ounces of serebrianka, and batch IV used four ounces of serebrianka, and to be honest I couldn't tell much of a difference in the hopping.

Weak hops in small amounts is good for wheat beers tho. If you want to use weak hops on a beer that you plan to be "hoppy," ADD MOAR HOPS. If I were to suddenly have the urge to brew another maris otter/willamette SMaSH, I would NOT use 2.5 oz, like I did the first time. I would use more like five or six ounces, with probably 1 oz at 60, 2oz at flameout, and the rest between 15-5 minutes. And note that I'm saying "weak" hops, but that's not really a particularly good descriptor of the hops I've discussed. Willamette, serebrianka, fugges etc are lower AA hops, and don't have a particularly large flavor potential. These hops give off more delicate, floral, earthy, or whatever flavors, and thus you can add them more liberally without much risk of turning your beer into an over-hopped abomination.

Contrast this to citra or simcoe hops. These have higher AA contents, and without a doubt have a much larger flavoring potential per ounce than the "weaker" hops. Over-do it on these varieties and you'll have a "bomb" of whatever flavor. I purposely used a metric fuckton of citra on my Munich/citra-bomb-from-hell beer that I hope to bottle either tomorrow or tuesday. Since I've seen so many stories of people over-doing it with the citra, I figured it's a right of passage that everybody goes through*, so I might as well just do it now, while I have citra hops. From the brief whiff I got when I added the 3oz dry hops, I expect I'll have a fruit-bomb from hell!

In contrast to my rather controversial approach to citra hops, you can of course use these particularly strongly flavored, high AA hops in a more sparing fashion than you would with the weaker varieties. In fact, I would hazard a wild guess that you could use 6 oz of willamette verses 2 oz citra in the same beer, and the citra would still be more intensely flavored. This is speculation, and not meant to be taken as a quantitative comparison between citra and willamette. But surely there is some amount of willamette that would contribute the same amount of flavor and aroma as a considerably smaller amount of citra, whether that be a 5:2 ratio, a 6:1 ratio, or a 3:2 ratio, or whatever! To get the same degree of flavor from a less potent hop, you need MOAR HOPS, possibly a LOT more, depending on the hop.

You can obviously plug into beersmith or calculate in whatever way the contributions from the alpha acids in your hop of choice, and of course you should do exactly this. But the numbers don't always tell the whole story. It might take 2 ounces of citra, bittered to 30 IBUs to get an equally intense flavor and aroma profile that 6 ounces of willamette, bittered to 42 IBUs would give. Again, I'm just tossing out possibilities, but hopefully I'm not talking too far out of my ass here!** I think there's a fair amount of experience factor, and "art" of brewing that don't directly correlate with the parameters of beersmith. For instance, if you brewed similar two pale ales, but hopped to give different IBU levels, I do not think I could tell them apart if the total IBUs were 35 and 43. Perhaps I'm wrong about that, but I don't think my palate is that adept at picking out overall bitterness (or relative bitterness for that matter).

Anyway, I've got to head off to band practice, so I'll stop rambling on here (so I can ramble on there).

*please do not point out flaws in my theory if this is in fact NOT a right of passage, and some idiots just way-over do it with the citra because they didn't bother to read up on their new-found hop treasure before they brew. No sense in my ditching a perfectly good theory (even if it's clearly false), just because some pesky facts get in the way. Any dissent here and I'll put my fingers in my ears and go "la la la la la."

**a distinct possibility

 

“is AA still relevant at 10 min or knockout additions?” AA is only relevant in that even at 10 minutes left in the boil there is still a contribution to IBUs, albeit at a lower level than if they were added at the beginning of boil.

There is no genuine ‘metric’ for hop flavor/aroma. Notwithstanding that fact, there is indeed more hop flavor/aroma potential in American aroma hops (e.g., Centennial, Citra, Simcoe, Amarillo, etc.) then in European hops like East Kent Goldings, Saaz, Styrian Goldings, Tettnang, etc. So, how more potent is Citra vs. East Kent Goldings from a flavor/aroma perspective? I have no objective way of answering this but in past posts I have suggested maybe a 1:4 ratio. In other words, maybe 4 ounces of EKG is somewhat equivalent to 1 ounce of a hop like Centennial or Citra. What makes this guess even more problematic is that the hop crop varies from year to year.

The bottom line from my perspective is that if you are looking for noticeable hop flavor/aroma in you can use less of an American aroma hop than a traditional European hop to achieve comparable results.

You will need to brew a number of beers to see what you desire in your beers.

Cheers!

 

Alpha acids can still isomerize and add bitterness even if added late or at flameout. The length of time of exposure and temperature of the wort are the main considerations. You could theoretically get whatever bitterness you wanted by adding a buttload of hops at one minute, or by adding a few hops at 60 minutes. However, the large late hop addition that offers X IBUs is a different beast than a relatively small addition of hops (which will then be boiled for an hour which) also offers X IBUs. The late or flameout additions don't isomerize as much alpha acids, but they give a lot more hops flavor and aroma.

So yeah, I could probably tell the difference between 1.5 and 4 ounces of knockout hops, even for willamette and friends, but for many hop types of hops I probably couldn't tell the difference between 2 oz and 3 oz (again, willamette).

I doubt I could tell the difference between 0.3 oz of magnum at 60 and 1 oz of EKG at 60, because most of the signature flavors or smells of hops that are boiled for an hour will be lost, leaving only IBUs. Perhaps with more practice I could detect all the minute aspects of every beer, but I do admit that while decent, I'm not the greatest beer critic/taster who ever lived.

 

i was just thinking about this last night.

i've made IPAs where my 1st hop addition was at 15 min and the rest (EIGHT ounces!) was flameout w/a 20 min whirlpool at 175 F. flavour-wise, it was incredible. a front-of-the-tongue bitterness without the astringent IPA-ish bitterness we're used to.

i drew up a stout recipe last night and i was debating about the late hop additions. i'm all about hop flavours vs hop bittering. so, for me, i wish there was a way to measure the amount of FLAVOUR a hop addition will provide. does 0.5 oz at 5 min give you half the flavour of 1.0 oz? when does it become to much? too little? we randomly use multiples of 1 oz. like, most people will toss in an ounce of something at 5 min.

finally, is there a need to add hops at 60 min? if you add some at 30 min, you get flavour, aroma PLUS some bittering and the preservative benefits of hops, right? not sure why we still use the 60 min hop addition for most brews. you're just losing the flavour from that addition.

 

Thanks to barfdiggs, I now know how ginormous* flameout additions can bring an extra large amount of super-awesomeness to your hoppy beers.

On the stout, I guess it depends what you are looking for in the beer. I just brewed an oatmeal stout, and only added hops at 60 and 20. I added quite a LOT of hops (about eight oz total, huge for an oatmeal stout), BUT... they were serebrianka, which are weak (and I was trying to finish off the bag so I just used a shovel, lol). Keep in mind - Serebrianka are weak, 2.3% AA, and they are pretty subtle/delicate in the flavors and aroma they add. Chock this one up to experimental, I guess. Normally for an oatmeal stout I am not expecting nor really wanting a large amount of hop flavor, only balancing bitterness. Always open to try new things tho, perhaps a stout with a large late addition may be the next rage. I know RABC's dry hopped porter was really nice, I am planning something along those lines not too far down the line.

As a more general brewing rule tho, I have yet to make any late hop addition that I regretted, and I've added hops at 3 minutes or less in every beer I've made to date, save for about five (two of those were stouts). Now while I might not like hoppy wheat beers too much, there's nothing saying that you're wrong if you put five ounces of flameout hops in your next American wheat or Hef. And for most non-super-strong hop varieties, I really doubt that any particular ounce here or there difference will make or break the beer.

Why an ounce? Probably because we're mostly Americans here. They use metrics in large swaths of non-America, but whatever! There are only two countries, America and non-America. So if we wanna use ounces, miles, gallons, 16 oz pints, or whatever, well, this is America! We do what we want!!

*as an extreme derail, I have a theory that the word "ginormous" was originally coined by a sportscaster

 

Al, I used 7 oz of willamette in a 10 gallon batch of brown ale and found that the hop flavor was lacking, if non-exsistant. I used 1 oz of citra in a similar gravity APA 5 gallon batch and found it to be pungent. I don't think willamette could hang with citra, ever. No matter what. Ever. Period.

 

I probably didn't over-do it with the serebrianka in my stout then. They're even weaker than willamette.

Not that willamette is bad tho, sometimes the more subtle hops fit better with a particular beer. You know, when less is moar. I don't know that I'd really want a pilsner that used six ounces of citra*, but I'd surely have no issue with a pilsner that had six ounces of willamette.

*of course I would still likely drink it anyway if it were my own homebrew, but I'd probably wise up and just use willamette or tettnanger or hallertau next time. that's why I've conducted my citra-bomb-from-hell smash experiment. because I have to learn everything the hard way, even if I clearly know the results in advance.

 

Because not all beers need to taste or smell like a mouth/nose full of hops.

 

Hear, hear!

When I homebrew my Oatmeal Stout I have only one hop addition: bittering (60 minutes of boil).

Cheers!

P.S. My Hefeweizen only has one bittering addition as well.