There are no rules here, when it comes to hopping beer! Beer taste is a personal thing, if you make your own beers from extract or grain, you can hop them however you like!
How many hops in one brew?
You can make great beers with just one hop. Bell's Two-Hearted Ale is Centennial only and is one of the top rated beers in America. Centennial is a fabulous hop. My mate came back from America and searched the UK for Two-Hearted, couldn't find it, so I made a clone! I've never tasted the original though! Russian River Row 2 Hill 56 is a Simcoe only IPA, another top rated beer, another fantastic hop. Amarillo is used on its own in many beers, because it's an amazing hop. So is Citra, so is Cascade. The same applies to English hops - you can make great beers with Goldings, with First Gold, with Challenger, with Fuggles, with Brewer's Gold, with Bramling Cross. Same applies with hops from down under - Galaxy, Nelson Sauvin, Motueka and Wakatu, for example.
Combinations
But they all blend well with other hops too. Many beers have 2 or 3 hops. Some 4 or 5. A few have 6 or 7. I'd suggest that you explore individual hop flavours, and how two hops can work together. Fuggles and Goldings are a celebrated duo. So are Amarillo and Simcoe. Centennial and Cascade. Cascade and Willamette. Green Bullet with Nelson Sauvin or Motueka. There are endless great combinations, and it's great to experiment. First Gold and Northdown made a great beer for me. I really like Challenger and Progress together. Do what I have done, research recipes others have made successfully. Look up recipes for beers you love. Look at brewery websites to see if they tell you what hops they use. Ratebeer.com sometimes tells you in the beer's rating page. See what hop combinations they use, what malts, and what style of yeast.
Rough guide to boil times!
It's common to use a bittering type at the start of the boil, and then put the best flavour hops at the end. Sometimes a few, sometimes a lot of hops. By the end I mean any time within the last 20 mins. To maximise bitterness, extraction hops need a 60 minute boil or longer. To maximise flavour, 15-20 mins. To maximise aroma, 0-7 mins. Dry hopping is great for aroma too, but the aroma has a different nature to the aroma from a short boil. Try each way without the other, and both together. It's now trendy to put all the hops in during the last 15-20 minutes of the boil, using a lot of hops to give enough bitterness and loads of hops flavour and aroma. I read about one brewer who has put 200g of a single hop in at 10 minutes (23 litres) with a whole variety of hops. He highly recommended this and explained it was not for the faint hearted! Home brewers are forever trying new combinations, quantities and timings. I know a lot of brewers put a small amount of bittering hops in at the start of the boil, maybe for 10-20 IBUs, and then load in the flavour hops in the last 10 minutes, and dry hop.
Balancing hops with malt and yeast
And it's not all about hops. You have to consider other things when you are working out how to hop a beer. Making a good IPA or pale ale, or any other ale, is down to a range of things like choice of grain, percentages of each grain, hop choices, quantities and timings, mash temperature, and yeast choice and fermentation temperature. It's also very much down to taste. One person's nectar is another person's cod liver oil. Do you like your pale ale very dry, or do you want some sweetness to work against the hop bitterness? Do you want it very bitter, like 60-100 IBUs, mid range, 35 -60 IBUs, or more restraint, with the focus on hop flavour, like 20 - 35 IBUs? Do you want to add some caramel sweetness from crystal malts? A bit of roast from dark grains? Do you wants tons of aroma from steeping and dry hopping? Do you prefer hops to play a more balanced role, with a restrained bitterness and just enough flavour to complement the malts, and the yeast?
Different focus
In some beers the yeast is the main flavour source, from strong flavours like wheat yeasts and some Belgian yeasts down to subtle flavours found in many English yeasts which can give a lightly hopped ale a delicate and highly more-ish fruitiness, which is often complemented with delicate, floral hops. In a yeast focused beer, the role of the hops is to complement the yeast.
Other beers are malt focused, and the hops will often just provide bitterness - but the Americans have blown that away and looked for ways of complementing malt flavours with hop flavours. Do you like your dark beers to have hop flavour, or does that just distract from, and clash with, the malts? I have found that I like English hop flavour in dark beers, and I think Centennial goes well too. And some of the American high alpha hops are great for bittering dark beers. It's worth trying Amarillo too, certainly in brown and amber ales. You may like to hop a stout or Porter the way you would an American IPA - try it and see, it's common amongst American brewers.
Many UK home brewers seem to be chasing the ultimate hop hit, in hop focused beers, with a sledgehammer firmly in their grasp, and this may be your mission too. The yanks lead the way, look at American websites and forums. There are loads of fantastic hop focused beers out there now, it's just about finding your favourite hops and working out how to get the best from them to suit your taste buds.
But let's not forget that a great beer can use hops in a much more subtle manner. Some American brewers seem to have grown tired of massively hopped ales and are looking for other things - soured beers and wild yeasts have become very popular, but English hop sales doubled last year apparently, after years of decline, due to demand from American microbreweries mainly. Great beer is always about the careful marrying of grains, hops and yeast, whether it's a sledgehammer IPA, A Belgian pale ale with fruit and spice from the yeast, a darker beer with deep malty tones and a complementary hoppiness, or a hop scented blonde with pear drop esters, ideal for a summer's day!
Experiment
I have managed to test a lot of things out by making small batches, usually by splitting a larger batch. Any kind of brewer can do this, you just need demijohns, small plastic buckets, or 2L/3L fizzy pop bottles. Hop them differently. Use different yeasts. Ferment at different temperatures. Steep some crystal, amber, chocolate, roast barley, boil and add it to one small batch - and make 2 - 4 litres of stout or porter from a pale, all grain or extract brew. From a 23 litre brew you could make 5 or 6 small batches which are all identical except for one thing - and maybe discover what 5 or 6 different hops tastes like. Or how one hop works with several grain combinations. And you get to drink 5 or 6 different beers. :drink:
How many hops in one brew?
You can make great beers with just one hop. Bell's Two-Hearted Ale is Centennial only and is one of the top rated beers in America. Centennial is a fabulous hop. My mate came back from America and searched the UK for Two-Hearted, couldn't find it, so I made a clone! I've never tasted the original though! Russian River Row 2 Hill 56 is a Simcoe only IPA, another top rated beer, another fantastic hop. Amarillo is used on its own in many beers, because it's an amazing hop. So is Citra, so is Cascade. The same applies to English hops - you can make great beers with Goldings, with First Gold, with Challenger, with Fuggles, with Brewer's Gold, with Bramling Cross. Same applies with hops from down under - Galaxy, Nelson Sauvin, Motueka and Wakatu, for example.
Combinations
But they all blend well with other hops too. Many beers have 2 or 3 hops. Some 4 or 5. A few have 6 or 7. I'd suggest that you explore individual hop flavours, and how two hops can work together. Fuggles and Goldings are a celebrated duo. So are Amarillo and Simcoe. Centennial and Cascade. Cascade and Willamette. Green Bullet with Nelson Sauvin or Motueka. There are endless great combinations, and it's great to experiment. First Gold and Northdown made a great beer for me. I really like Challenger and Progress together. Do what I have done, research recipes others have made successfully. Look up recipes for beers you love. Look at brewery websites to see if they tell you what hops they use. Ratebeer.com sometimes tells you in the beer's rating page. See what hop combinations they use, what malts, and what style of yeast.
Rough guide to boil times!
It's common to use a bittering type at the start of the boil, and then put the best flavour hops at the end. Sometimes a few, sometimes a lot of hops. By the end I mean any time within the last 20 mins. To maximise bitterness, extraction hops need a 60 minute boil or longer. To maximise flavour, 15-20 mins. To maximise aroma, 0-7 mins. Dry hopping is great for aroma too, but the aroma has a different nature to the aroma from a short boil. Try each way without the other, and both together. It's now trendy to put all the hops in during the last 15-20 minutes of the boil, using a lot of hops to give enough bitterness and loads of hops flavour and aroma. I read about one brewer who has put 200g of a single hop in at 10 minutes (23 litres) with a whole variety of hops. He highly recommended this and explained it was not for the faint hearted! Home brewers are forever trying new combinations, quantities and timings. I know a lot of brewers put a small amount of bittering hops in at the start of the boil, maybe for 10-20 IBUs, and then load in the flavour hops in the last 10 minutes, and dry hop.
Balancing hops with malt and yeast
And it's not all about hops. You have to consider other things when you are working out how to hop a beer. Making a good IPA or pale ale, or any other ale, is down to a range of things like choice of grain, percentages of each grain, hop choices, quantities and timings, mash temperature, and yeast choice and fermentation temperature. It's also very much down to taste. One person's nectar is another person's cod liver oil. Do you like your pale ale very dry, or do you want some sweetness to work against the hop bitterness? Do you want it very bitter, like 60-100 IBUs, mid range, 35 -60 IBUs, or more restraint, with the focus on hop flavour, like 20 - 35 IBUs? Do you want to add some caramel sweetness from crystal malts? A bit of roast from dark grains? Do you wants tons of aroma from steeping and dry hopping? Do you prefer hops to play a more balanced role, with a restrained bitterness and just enough flavour to complement the malts, and the yeast?
Different focus
In some beers the yeast is the main flavour source, from strong flavours like wheat yeasts and some Belgian yeasts down to subtle flavours found in many English yeasts which can give a lightly hopped ale a delicate and highly more-ish fruitiness, which is often complemented with delicate, floral hops. In a yeast focused beer, the role of the hops is to complement the yeast.
Other beers are malt focused, and the hops will often just provide bitterness - but the Americans have blown that away and looked for ways of complementing malt flavours with hop flavours. Do you like your dark beers to have hop flavour, or does that just distract from, and clash with, the malts? I have found that I like English hop flavour in dark beers, and I think Centennial goes well too. And some of the American high alpha hops are great for bittering dark beers. It's worth trying Amarillo too, certainly in brown and amber ales. You may like to hop a stout or Porter the way you would an American IPA - try it and see, it's common amongst American brewers.
Many UK home brewers seem to be chasing the ultimate hop hit, in hop focused beers, with a sledgehammer firmly in their grasp, and this may be your mission too. The yanks lead the way, look at American websites and forums. There are loads of fantastic hop focused beers out there now, it's just about finding your favourite hops and working out how to get the best from them to suit your taste buds.
But let's not forget that a great beer can use hops in a much more subtle manner. Some American brewers seem to have grown tired of massively hopped ales and are looking for other things - soured beers and wild yeasts have become very popular, but English hop sales doubled last year apparently, after years of decline, due to demand from American microbreweries mainly. Great beer is always about the careful marrying of grains, hops and yeast, whether it's a sledgehammer IPA, A Belgian pale ale with fruit and spice from the yeast, a darker beer with deep malty tones and a complementary hoppiness, or a hop scented blonde with pear drop esters, ideal for a summer's day!
Experiment
I have managed to test a lot of things out by making small batches, usually by splitting a larger batch. Any kind of brewer can do this, you just need demijohns, small plastic buckets, or 2L/3L fizzy pop bottles. Hop them differently. Use different yeasts. Ferment at different temperatures. Steep some crystal, amber, chocolate, roast barley, boil and add it to one small batch - and make 2 - 4 litres of stout or porter from a pale, all grain or extract brew. From a 23 litre brew you could make 5 or 6 small batches which are all identical except for one thing - and maybe discover what 5 or 6 different hops tastes like. Or how one hop works with several grain combinations. And you get to drink 5 or 6 different beers. :drink:
