Seeking ideas for bulk hops buy

I'm ready to take advantage of the cost savings associated with buying hops in bulk. I don't brew in heavy volume, so I wanted to narrow the purchase down to three varieties that I can use most often. My favorite beers are IPA's, Hefeweizens, and other pale style ales, so I was thinking that I would order one pound each of Hallertau, Cascade, and Centennial.

Is this a good choice, or should I also buy a fourth variety?

By the way, I'm in Orange County, CA, so send me a message if you are interested in sharing a bulk purchase of hops and/or Dry Malt Extract (Light and Wheat).

Sounds like good choices to me.

For the styles you've listed, those are 3 good hops. Cascade & Centennial have a lot of similarities (they are considered subs for each other), so if you want more variety, you could get one of those & pick another 3rd hop. But those together will make some great IPAs and APAs.

I just made my first bulk hops purchase, and I went with Cascade and Centennial. I'm going to start working on developing a good House Pale Ale, so I was looking around, and those two were very common. I got myself some bulk 2-Row, Vienna, Caramel 10L, Cara-Pils, Nottingham Dry Yeast, Cascade and Centennial.

I figure I'd start with Ed Wort's Haus Ale and BierMuncher's Centennial Blonde. Two seemingly similar beers with enough differences to allow me a starting point to experiment a bit.

I just did a similar bulk hops purchase (which included all three of those types). The way I see it, those three you listed are like "base hops" (sort of like base grains). They'll be good in a lot of different stuff as the foundation. To the extent you need something more specialized, just buy whatever you need by the ounce as usual. For example, I love Steam beers, but I'm not going to buy a pound of Northern Brewer hops just for that style--I'll just get some from my LHBS whenever I want to make a batch.

If you want to branch out a bit more, I would suggest a high AA bittering hop, like Magnum. I started with Cascade and Willamette, and will soon be adding Amarillo, Magnum, and Fuggles to my stores.

For IPAs and other paler ales, I've really enjoyed using Challenger hops. I haven't had any problems coming by them in my area (near Chicago), and they're a great bittering/flavor hop.

My personal choices were Magnum to cover the bittering side of things, Cascade and Willamette for flava, and Hallertau for fancy-pants-ness.

Of course with four pounds I probably could have skipped the Magnum and just used more of the others to bitter, but I was in an IPA mood when I ordered them.

+1 on the Magnum. It's a great bittering hop with a lot of flexibility.

Honestly, why buy in bulk if you don't know what you need/want? Buy several in small quantities and brew with them, then buy in bulk, the prices will still be reasonable.

I made my first bulk hops purchase last month from hopsdirect. I mostly brew American and English ales. I chose Magnum, Cascade, Centennial, Amarillo and Goldings. I figured that would provide a lot of interesting combination possibilities.

I usually get Columbus, Centennial, Cascade, and Amarillo for Blondes, APAs, IPAs, and CDAs (Cascadian Dark Ales, AKA Black IPAs).

If I could get Simcoe in bulk from Hopsdirect, I would.

Bumping this