1 gallon tests: When to add hops to get the most representative aroma - at flame out, to fermenter or both?

[Yirg]

I'm going to brew several 1 gallon SMaSH batches with the same malt and yeast (Vienna and US-05) to try different hops (Amarillo, Centennial, Simcoe and Citra). To get the best representation of their unique aroma, should I add them at flame out, into the fermenter (dry hop) or a combination of both?

Note that I'm not using a chiller. I'll most likely use a no-chill cube.

 

[JohnSand]

I think that to get the best aroma without chilling, I would choose dry hopping.

 

[RM-MN]

Aroma is caused by aromatic oils and those are easy to boil away. Dry hopping avoids most of that.

 

[CascadesBrewer]

Basic Brewing Radio/Video does a number of hop samplers. Their process is to add 1 lb of DME to 3/4 gallons of water. Bring that just up to a boil, kill the heat, add ~1 oz of hops, and steep for 10 minutes. Then chill, pitch a few grams of US-05, and ferment. They often use less than one oz of hops to even out the bitterness across the 3 hops they try at a time. I have always just used 1 oz.

I tweaked their process a bit to add three 1/3 oz additions at 10 min boil, flameout, and dry hop. I think that gave a better overall hop character than just the steeping but I have been wanting to do a trial to test both.

My input is that you get different character out of a hop when added at 60 min vs 15 min vs 0 min vs 170F steep vs dry hopping. I would time the hop additions for how you will use the hops and what information you want to learn.