Hey guys, I’m trying to make a recipe to find the hop characteristics of a wild hop that I propagated to see if it’s worth growing more of it. I’m thinking of doing about 1.5+ gallons in a 3 gallon fermenter. My recipe right now looks like this... 1.8 gallons 2.5 lbs Pilsen light DME 0.2 oz hops at 40 minutes 0.5 oz at 10 0.5 oz at 5 1 oz at 0 1 oz at 170 2 oz dry hop How should I adjust the hop schedule to get as much info as I can? Since I have no knowledge of alpha acids I just arbitrarily added the wild hops to brewcipher at 8%... does this sound fair? To high? I know there’s no real good answer. With just Pilsen light the SRM will be pretty low, but does that really matter in this situation? And finally when I went to adjust the water (I’ll be using distilled), brewcipher didn’t show any grains so it couldn’t tell me the ph. Is this because I’m using dme? Is it necessary to adjust my water in this situation? And if so, what kind of ppms should I be aiming for? Thanks!
Yes. DME contains the minerals from the water that was used to create the wort that was then processed into DME. And there's no easy way to know what they were. IMO the most sensible approach with DME is to use distilled/RO water, and to not add any salts to it.
This is a cool experiment but I think ultimately you may have to make more than one batch to find out what you have. 3.2 ounces of hops (excluding the dryhop) in a 1.5 gallon batch brewed from Pilsner DME sounds like a lot to me when you have no idea of what type of hop it is. I personally would start with a 1/2 ounce as your 60 minute bittering charge with that malt base/batch size, and then add a couple ounces at 170. This way they are separated enough so that you can distinguish the bittering potential from the aroma/flavor potential as the 170 addition will not throw off a lot more IBUs. All those mid boil additions will muddy it up. Just my two cents and I'm no beer scientist but I do experiment a lot.
Yeah I may have gone a bit overboard haha... I guess I was just trying to replicate some hop sensory recipes I’ve seen before but yeah I guess you normally know what you're dealing with as far as alpha acids. An early and a late addition does make sense, thanks!
When they were fresh I got citrus, lemon, herbal and some garlic... so not amazing, but certainly something that might be usable
Hmmm good point... the wild plant has been growing for about 5 or 6 years now, but I took some cuttings and dug up some rhizomes just last year... so to answer your question, 1 year
I would be inclined to use a neutral high alpha hop at 60 (warrior comes to mind) and use the unknown at the end of the boil. This way you could better control the bitterness but still find out about flavor and aroma of the unknown. I was confused about the 1oz at 170 but I guess that is a hopstand? Anyway I think your additions are reasonable but I would just use 1oz each at 15, 10, 5, FO and then the 2oz dry hop. Theoretically you can taste it before the DH and get an idea of what DH with these does. Are these hops fresh or dried? If they are fresh I believe the multiplier is 5x. Cool experiment. Good luck. Please post the final result.
@CShell1234, just out of curiosity how big are the cones of this wild hop plant? Are they greater than 1 inch in length? Cheers!
@NiceFly they we’re picked last fall and dried... they have since been in the freezer @JackHorzempa if I recall correctly, this was one of the bigger ones and it was over an inch and a half (and yes, I just measured my hand based on the picture)
Thanks for the information and providing photographs! Those are some nice looking hops. I have seen some wild hops growing in a park near me and those hop cones were quite small - less than an inch in length. I have thought about brewing a small batch with them just to see how they would taste in beer but I never did. Best of luck with your batch. Cheers!
I’ve got some magnum, so that should work... and speaking of neutral, I’ve got a pack of WLP001 and US-05... is one regarded as more neutral?
