Controlling Hop Utilization

[pnihan]

I'm working with a pretty small sample size, but the beers that I have made thus far in my brewing career have been more bitter than I have expected with very little of the great hop flavors and aroma. Really the only time that I have noticed the flavor and aroma have been by using a flameout addition or dry hopping. My thought is that my time to cool the beer might be too long, thus I'm getting extra hop utilization and my flavor/aroma compounds are degrading.

I currently have a 25' 3/8" immersion chiller for cooling. I don't know the exact cooling time as I haven't kept great records for that piece, I definitely will going forward. The ideal answer would be to cool the batch down faster. But in the meantime, could I just limit the amount of time the hops are in contact with the wort by simply removing the hop bag at specified times? I have a feeling that this would reduce the bitterness, but how would this affect the flavor/aroma aspects? Also, I think this would make things tough when trying to make a clone recipe.

Cheers.

 

[BBL_Brewer]

I'd say your best bet would be to go lighter on the bittering hops and heavier on the late additions. That would decrease the bitterness and increase the hop flavor/aroma. I guess if it's taking you quite a while to cool, that does factor somewhat into your utilization. But I don't think that it would cause a significant increase in bitterness. Vigor of boil affects utilization and once things start to cool utilization will drop. Once the wort gets down to 140-150F (which should happen pretty quickly) I would think that utilization would be similar to first wort hoppping, which everyone agrees contributes less bitterness than a bittering hop addition. I also don't think that bagging the hops and removing them at specified times would accomplish your goal. If the extended cooling time was causing the beer to be overly bitter, then most of that bitterness would be coming from the late addition hops since most of the alpha acids in the bittering hops have already been utilized. If you pull the late additions out, you'll reduce your hop aroma and flavor, which you already find to be lacking. Just shift your hops more towards the late additions and I think you'll get what you're looking for. It will take more hops to get the same bitterness, but you'll get more flavor and aroma.