What to do in a hop shortage?????

As a community of beer makers and a few beer drinkers it would be a great time to pull our heads together to see how we can get through this.

#1 How do we maximize what hops we got to brew beer?

#2 What beers can we make that still taste hoppy with using few hops?

#3 What beers or ALT's can we make that require no hops and still taste good?

There are several threads already that discuss this.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=43357 is pretty detailed and links to other threads.

I think the shortage really depends on where you live and what steps your LHBS took to ensure they would have hops. Prices went up at quite a few places, and some selections are low. And then there are places where prices have stayed low and the selection is great.

This should probably go in the hop shortage sticky.

Anyway...

1: Hops have a finite amount of AA. I'm not sure what you mean by "maximize", though. If you first wort hop, you'll probably get the most efficiency with regards to bitterness. But past that...you'll only get what they have to give. You can't get blood from a turnip, my paw always used to say.

2: If you're concerned about it, just make a light ale with very few specialty grains. That relatively blank slate will bring the hop flavor to the front. You can also dry-hop a beer and use the "spent" hops to bitter another batch, since the bittering acids will still be present...but you need to do more research on what this means for your AA%.

3: Beer by definition has hops in it. You can try apfelwein, cider, mead, wine, etc. though.

I'm for brewing lighter ales this summer......but then again, I don't have a hop shortage because I've been trading with other members here.

hop extract