How do you decide on hop proportions?

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I often use two and sometimes more than two hops in a brew, I suspect most of us do quite often.

I’ve been brewing beers I like but I’m now consciously trying to “taste” my beers. Bizarrely I’ve only just noticed that in one of my beers at least the flavours of one hop completely dominate. I will definitely change the balance next time I brew this beer - probably won’t like it any more!

When coming up with your own recipes how do you know you’ve got the right proportions and does it matter if you like whatever you’ve produced?
 
I often use two and sometimes more than two hops in a brew, I suspect most of us do quite often.

I’ve been brewing beers I like but I’m now consciously trying to “taste” my beers. Bizarrely I’ve only just noticed that in one of my beers at least the flavours of one hop completely dominate. I will definitely change the balance next time I brew this beer - probably won’t like it any more!

When coming up with your own recipes how do you know you’ve got the right proportions and does it matter if you like whatever you’ve produced?
I look up the style and the ABV and IBU, as a rough rule of thumb is 33% bittering and 66% aroma depending on the hops. Getting to know the hops is a good starting point, so you can use the ones you like.
 
I tried the "experimental' route and had to drink some genuine ****! This was mainly due to the mix of grains rather than the type of hops being used, so I reduced the number of grains down to about four and knocked out almost all of the adjuncts. (The exceptions being chillies and grapefruit juice.)

I also tried multiple hop additions before deciding that my taste buds must be shot because I couldn't taste any significant difference and finally decided on just two hops. Usually, a bittering hops during the boil and an aroma hop afterwards.

I occasionally mixed two hops together (e.g. Citra and Hallertau) if I wanted a particular flavour, but generally stuck to a single hop for each stage.

I did learn one thing the hard way and that was to minimise the amount of bittering hops because it was quite possible to make a brew that puckered the mouth like sucking a lemon if the % wasn't considered when weighing out the amount of hops.

I eventually started to use the Style Guidelines and the Brewers Friend Recipe section to check what I was about to brew so the outcome wasn't so bad!
 
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