Small batches of pale ale for hop experimentation.

I want to brew some small batches of a pale ale that I can use to experiment with different hop varieties. This is what I'm thinking so far:

Two gallon batch -

3 lbs pale LME
WLP001 California Ale Yeast
.5oz hops - .25 oz at boil, .25 at 5 minutes

I'd prefer to do one gallon batches, but as far as I can tell, that would involve ridiculously small amounts of hops.

I want to break this up to plastic one-gallon water jugs for fermentation, which would give me 1 gallon to taste without dry hopping and one gallon to taste with it for each hop variety. I'd also have plenty of these jugs available, since I'd use the water for the boil, and I could just use them once and then toss them. All I'd need to purchase as far as supplies would be rubber stoppers and airlocks, which are cheap.

There are 11 hop varieties at my local home brew store that are listed as bittering/aroma, so this ought to keep me busy for a while.

My questions:

Should I use some sort of steeping grain, or will the pale LME do the trick as far as malt goes? I would prefer to keep the malt as simple as possible, so I can concentrate on learning the taste of the hops.

While looking for similar ideas on the forums, I saw mention of adjusting the hop quantities based on alpha acid percentage. However, I can't make any sense of the calculations that seem to be required to do this. Therefore, I figured I'd just use the same amount of hops in each batch regardless of variety, which would at least teach me which hops need to be adjusted up or down in quantity for future batches. Will this likely give me what I'm looking for here, or do I really need to be doing these calculations?

Thanks,
Matt

Matt,

Welcome to the board. You certainly can do 1 gallon batches. IMO I would brew a 5 gallon batch as normal using plain old extra light LME but towards the end of the boil siphon the hot wort into one gallon containers that can withstand near-boiling heat and then simply drop in your aroma hops and steep for 5 or 10 minutes, then cool by sticking them in the fridge.

When cool, add a packet of dry yeast to each gallon batch.

You could split it even further into 1/2 gallon batches and test all 11 varieties but your scale would have to be pretty accurate.

I like the original idea, maybe with 3 ounces of cara 20 or 40 for steeping.

By "cara 20 or 40," you mean carapils, 3 oz per 2 gallon batch?

Caramel malts, like Briess 2 row caramel 20 or 40.

http://www.brewmasterswarehouse.com/product/0101444/briess-2-row-caramel-20
http://www.brewmasterswarehouse.com/product/0101445/briess-2-row-caramel-40

And yes that much per batch.

Sounds like SMASH to me: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/what-does-term-smash-mean-138096/

If you want to speed up the process, your bittering add will be minimally effected by the different hop choices, so I'd just make a large batch and choose a hop to bitter with. At the end of the boil split it into however many smaller batches you want and steep the hop of choice. Another plus to this is you wouldn't have to worry about adjusting hop amounts to keep bitterness the same (it'll effect your perception if you don't) since the flameout add will add little to it.

I'm really interested in doing a bunch of 1 gallon batches to test out different hops.
Could you get around the ridiculously small amounts needed by using shorter boil times?
ie. add .25 oz at 30 mins for an equal amount of bittering/flavoring and .25 oz at 5 mins for aroma.
Or am I misunderstanding this chart : http://www.brewsupplies.com/hop_characteristics.htm

I'm doing the same thing, only i'm taking 5.5gal batches and scaling them down to 2.75gal batches in BeerSmith. It scales the hops as well.

Just did my first one over the weekend using Maris Otter and Cascade hops, but don't have any airlock action yet. If its not bubbling when i get home i'll have to open it up and see whats going on.

pimento said:

I'm really interested in doing a bunch of 1 gallon batches to test out different hops.
Could you get around the ridiculously small amounts needed by using shorter boil times?
ie. add .25 oz at 30 mins for an equal amount of bittering/flavoring and .25 oz at 5 mins for aroma.
Or am I misunderstanding this chart : http://www.brewsupplies.com/hop_characteristics.htm

Click to expand...

if you're doing such small batches, id ditch the bittering add and just load up on late adds (<20mins). it'll give you more of the flavor/aroma that you're looking for

http://www.mrmalty.com/late_hopping.htm