Alpha Acid Content- is the package accurate?

[Cubedude3]

Hi All,

So after a 2 year hiatus I finally broke out my recipe (first) to improve on it and brew another batch. It's a Citra/Amarillo IPA, and my question pertains to the alpha acid content of the Amarillo hops.

All online resources state that Amarillo should be somewhere near 8% or more alpha content, but the packages I received state 2.5% alpha. Should I take this as accurate? Anyone ever see this? Maybe it had to do with that particular harvest. It may be a moot point now as I already brewed it as if it were 2.5%- it's about to be racked to secondary today.

Hopefully it doesn't turn out to be mouth puckering bitter! Fingers crossed.

Thanks guys

 

[thehaze]

I do not think Amarillo should only have 2.5% AA.

I think a mistake occured during the labeling. Maybe try to contact the shop you purchased from.

My guess is they are 8.5% and not only 2.5. All the Amarillo I tried from 2016 had 8.5% AA and these were USA harvests. ( I live in Europe )

But the beer will not turn out mouth puckering. Even at higher AA, Amarillo is pretty smooth and delivers lots of aroma and flavour, without being annoyingly bitter or astringent. So just let it ferment, dry hop, bottle / keg and let us know how it turned out.

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

Fortunately, once you reach about 70 IBU's it gets rather difficult to detect more than that. And I don't believe that anyone can detect more than 100 IBU's.

 

[Cubedude3]

Darn, I figured. Hahah well I have a personal preference for lower IBUs/lower gravity beers so thankfully even if it were 8.5% acid content I am only looking at about 63 IBUs (1.057 OG) for a BU:GU of 1.1 or so. Maybe it was a happy accident We shall see.

This was originally more of a light IPA so it may very well turn out OK.

Thanks for the input guys, I will let you know how it turns out!