Any point to more than 2 hop additions?

[havadog]

Hi Folks - My understanding is that hops serve 2-3 purposes. 1)Bittering - alpha acids provide bittering to offset the sweetness of the malt, 2)Taste -often described as middle-late hop additions, and 3)Aroma - late hop additions. My minimally-educated perspective of taste processing is that taste is a combination of the 4-5 taste senses (salt, sweet, bitter, sour, umami), coupled with aroma. If this is correct, what possible benefit would there be to hopping at times other than beginning of boil for maximal AA (bitterness) and then at the very end (flameout or dry hop) to minimize volatile oil evaporation, which contributes to aroma (and as such, taste as well)?

thanks!
m

 

[Nateo]

Does a raw apple have a stronger flavor than a cooker one? Yeah, but maybe you don't always want raw apples.

While a lot of what we perceive as flavor is really aroma, the mid/late hop additions provide a hop flavor you can't get from flameout/dry hops alone. Some of my best hoppy beers have used only mid/late hops. I usually only use -60min bittering hops on beers like Hefes, Belgians or something else where I don't really want any/much hop character.

 

[ksbrain]

IMO there are four slots for hop additions: bittering, flavor, aroma, dry. Not every beer uses them all, but those are the allocations. For me, that's generally 60 minutes, 20 minutes, 5 minutes, and 10 days.

Seems to me like a beer with a 20 minute addition would turn out differently than one without.

 

[weirdboy]

Don't forget first wort hops.

You really do get different characteristics from the hops from different timing. Try doing some side-by-side comparisons.

 

[BioBeing]

The alpha acids (and other compounds) in the hops isomerize, oxidize and polymerize during the boil to actually generate quite an array of different compounds. By adding the hops at different times, there are different amounts of various chemical reactions occurring, leading to different taste and aroma profiles. IOW - more additions is going (in general) lead to a more diverse flavor/aroma profile than fewer additions. This, of course, may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the beer style you are shooting for, and the actual hop varieties used...

 

[remilard]

You are correct that flavor is simply taste + retronasal aroma. So the concept of a "flavor" addition just means that you are getting some aroma and some bitterness.

Many will argue that a hop boiled 20 minutes will provide an aromatic character that cannot be achieved from flameout hopping.

My IIPA uses hop extract at 60, and then nothing until after flameout. It has never scored below 40 in competition and nobody criticizes it for lacking complexity or for not having any hop flavor. So that is one datapoint.

The only time I add more than one hop addition during the boil is if I want a very small amount of hop aroma and I worry that even a very small flameout addition would give me too much.