Help with SMaSH Hop Schedule

[LastChanceBrewing]

I'm brewing a SMaSH IPA this weekend but I've never put together my own recipe (SMaSH seems like an easy place to start but apparently not easy enough since I'm still here asking questions).

For a 5 gallon recipe, I was thinking 10lb golden promise mashed at 150 for 75 mins with this hop schedule:

1 oz equinox 13.6% at 60 min
1 oz equinox at 20 min
1 oz equinox at 0 min
1 oz equinox dry hop

Please critique my hop schedule!


I'm also open to not doing a smash and adding additional varieties of hops since I also have these hops that I need to use up: .75 oz northern brewer, .5 oz centennial, .5 oz hallertau, .5 oz magnum. Any advice on how I could use some of these? Or should i just stick to the SMaSH?

Thanks!

 

[jfr1111]

Smash is fine.

I speak from personnal preference here, but I have done away with the 60/20/0 scheme of bittering, especially with high alpha hops, because you can't use as much hops for fear of going too bitter.

For all my hoppy beers, I now will use a token addition at 60 minute to break surface tension and prevent boilover, with my bittering coming solely from a 15 minute addition and Whirlpool/hopstand.

For example, my house pale ale is also almost straight English base malt. I have a poud of wheat malt for head retention and body. It uses this hop Schedule (for 6 gallons @ 1.046 SG):

.25 oz Willamette @ 60
1 oz Simcoe @ 15
2 oz Simcoe @ 0 (30 min hop stand @ 200F+)

I will then dry hop with 2 oz of Simcoe for 7 days.

This I feel is on the hoppy to very hoppy side for a pale ale. It produces a firm bitterness but is far from overwhelming. The calculated IBUs are low, but I attribute this to the fact that the formulas don't take correctly into account the effect of Whirlpool hops.

It would be my minimum hop schedule for an IPA, which means your recipe probably needs more finishing hops and more dry hop, altough this is all preference.

 

[BigMack]

I am sure I am in the minority on this, but I actually like a nice 60 minute addition. I've used FWH and also used late additions to get a fair amount of my IBUs, but sometimes I just feel like those methods lack that bit of a punch you get from a nice early bittering addition. Thats just my$0.02 though. I know most on here recommend getting nearly all of your IBUs from late additions so I just thought I would throw my opinion out there.