Dry hop run down

A member of my homebrew club brought a ton of hops to our Christmas party in January to give out and I went home with three good sized bags of hops. Two of which were Chinook, which I really dislike when used for bittering. I mentioned on twitter that I wasn’t sure what to do with all of these chinook hops, and another member of the club, Tyler, tweeted back that he was in the same boat.

I suggested we try them as dry hops:

An interesting idea that’s been floating around in the craft brewing and homebrewing arenas recently is getting yourself some generic american light lagers, opening the bottles and dry hopping them with a few pellets of hops. You use a variety of hops (though only one variety per bottle) let them steep at room temp for a few days, then chill, decant and taste. It’s a way to give yourself an idea of how that hop variety would taste when used as a dry hop without much in the background beer to muddy the waters (so to speak). I believe this idea originated with Anchor Brewing.

This idea resonated with tyler, and he suggested we do so with a large variety of hops and bring the resulting beers to the next club meeting since the theme was hoppy beers. He got some additional hop varieties donated from our LHBS, I had some additional pellets in bulk in my fridge, in all we ended up with 11 different hop varieties dry hopped in Coors Light since we couldn’t bring ourselves to buy Bud (lesser evil I guess? we were gonna get Miller Lite but couldn’t find it in bottles).

Anyway, after that long introduction here are my notes on the hops we sampled:

• Hallertauer Hersbrucker – quite lemony, herbal
• East Kent Goldings – mild herbal
• Amarillo – fruity and delicious
• Willamette – cheesy (these were also gifted at the club party and had apparently not been stored well, I doubt this is representative of the variety)
• Horizon – herbal, slight lemon
• Cascade – fruit, citrus
• HBC 438 – slight peach and licorice? this one was kind of odd
• Glacier – herbal
• Mosaic – overwhelming cat piss, lemon, fruit
• Falconer’s Flight – really lemony
• Chinook – herbal, flowery; could be good dry hopped in a saison

A few things that stuck out to me:

I was surprised at the lemonyness of the Hallertauer Hersbrucker. That wasn’t something I would expect from a noble hop.

I didn’t hate EKG or Chinook as dry hops. I generally dislike both of these hops when used in the boil. I’m actually looking forward to using the Chinook as a dry hop in some saison down the line.

I thought Mosaic was disgusting, it was super cat pee. I’ve gotten this before from beers featuring Mosaic, but generally not as a dry hop. I used to think it was a 30 minute addition that brought out the cat pee for Mosaic, but now I’m wondering if there’s something else at work here (harvest time, hop yard, vintage?).

The Willamette were cheesy, I guess they hadn’t been stored well, but it’s still not a loss, I’m going to put them into a paper bag and let them sit out and fully oxidize, the cheesiness well go away and they’ll eventually be good hops for use in sour beers.

All in all it was a cool experiment and an easy one to do to try out a whole bunch of hop varieties. Just don’t be too upset about drinking some hop particles as they don’t always like to stay at the bottom of the bottles.