citra with amarillo or citra with zamba for the dry hop addition?

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fluketamer

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my first ipa came out very good with rave reviews from my ipa drinking friends.

the hop schedule was
.5 oz magnum at 60 mins
1 oz citra at 10 mins
2 oz citra whirlpool 160 for 20 mins.
1 oz citra dry hop day 7-10.

i want to try again with more hop aroma so i was going to dry hop my next one with 2 oz instead of the 1.

originally i was just going to go with 2 oz of citra in the dry hop but i have amarillo and zamba both of which i like. so i wanted to get fancy.

will citra and zamba go together or will that be too complicated. should i stick with a citra /amarillo dry hop to be safer. anyone ever mixed these hops like this?
 
You've been homebrewing since 2008 and just made your first IPA in 2025? Is it a style that you just disliked until recently? If you had Citra, Amarillo, and Zamba on hand, you were making pale ales but not IPAs? Or did you mean "my first IPA of 2025" and not "ever"?

I've never had Zamba with Citra before, but I can't imagine it not going well together, considering all the common flavors they share.
 
i have been brewing since 1989. way before i joined hbt. i grew up on budweiser so anything over 5 percent i didint particularly care for and all the ipas were 6- 8.

ipa's also scared me. i was a kit brewer for a long long time and ales dont really work well from kits. i brewed lagers and stouts for a long long time. kits extract partial mash. 2 years ago i switched to all grain . after drinking about 50 gallons of lager in 2024 i started to get a little bored of them. and tried a few sessionable ipas. and liked them. i made the ale above and i am surprised at how well it turned out.

i also made a lot of kolsh over the last year or so and i experimented with adding different citrusy hops to them to spice them up sometimes, thats why i have some hops on hand.

i have decided my next attempt at an ipa will be :

5.5 gallons:

full vol no sparge.

filterd nyc tap water

10 lbs of breiss 2 row
.5 lbs crystal 20
.5 lb of carapils.

.5 oz magnum at 60
1 oz citra at 10
2 oz citra whirlpool
1 oz citra and 1 oz zamba dry hop day 5- 8ish

i will prolly use bry 97 at 65 degrees.

looking at it now i hope the 1 oz of zamba doesnt get lost in there.
 
i have been brewing since 1989. way before i joined hbt. i grew up on budweiser so anything over 5 percent i didint particularly care for and all the ipas were 6- 8.

ipa's also scared me. i was a kit brewer for a long long time and ales dont really work well from kits. i brewed lagers and stouts for a long long time. kits extract partial mash. 2 years ago i switched to all grain . after drinking about 50 gallons of lager in 2024 i started to get a little bored of them. and tried a few sessionable ipas. and liked them. i made the ale above and i am surprised at how well it turned out.

i also made a lot of kolsh over the last year or so and i experimented with adding different citrusy hops to them to spice them up sometimes, thats why i have some hops on hand.
Nice context to have. Makes sense. Hoppy beers are the number one kind of beer I've brewed. Pale ales. IPAs. APAs. So I think either the second or third beer I brewed was an IPA. Nowadays, I make a ton of session IPAs. The last 3 I've made were 4.1%, 4.4%, and 4.5%, but 10 years ago, I made a lot of double IPAs (7% and 8%, for example) and triple IPAs (9% and 10%, for example). But now I want to keep them in the 4% to 6% range, so I definitely get where you're coming from.

Citra is a very dominant hop, so it can kind of overpower weaker hops, but Zamba is not at all a weak hop. I do think that Citra and Zamba would be complimentary since they both are mainly citrus and tropical.

https://beermaverick.com/hops/hop-comparison-tool/

This actually shows the overlap of just how similar they are. It has Citra just slightly more in the citrus field and Zamba just slightly more in the tropical field with Zamba having more stone fruit and Citra having more resin/pine and spice.
 
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