Diminishng returns on boiling hops

[acolman]

Good Morning,

Quick question;

At what point do hops stop imparting flavour and just become bittering? I use magnum for bittering because it just seems a waste to use a flavorful fragrant hop at the beginning of a boil.

So when is that the flavour and fragrance are lost? And if there are any rules for different hop addition times I would love to know them.

Thanks!

Andrew

 

[MalFet]

It's not quite so cut and dry as that, just because I don't think you can meaningfully say what is and isn't a "flavor". Bitter is a flavor after all, right? Different bittering hops will contribute different characters to a beer. Is that flavor? Or something else?

That said, you are of course right that late hops will maintain a higher degree of nuance in their flavor and aroma than early hops will. Your practice of using a high-alpha for bittering is relatively standard, though I don't think it is fair to say that using something else is a patent waste.

If you look at beer recipes, you'll see that most beers have an addition at the very beginning of the brew and another right at the end. Many will have an intermediate addition, too, somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-30 minutes. Then there are other breweries like dogfish head that will hop continuously for some beers (though this is probably just a gimmick).