Hop varieties & Bittering

[brad2157]

I was looking to get a beer clone recipe kit from Austin Homebrew supply. They also list the recipe ingredients on their website. For the bittering hops, it simply states 5HBU pack and 3HBU pack. I noticed that several people had already asked questions on their site about what type of hops are in these packs and this was their answers:



“The hops in the 5 HBU pack are going to be possibly more than one hop or not.. To determine what the HBU is, you're going to have to take the
HBU = AA% x oz. So you would need to know the weight of each package and the HBU of the package (in this case 5). AA% is HUB/ weight.”

“The HBU pack is only used for the bittering addition that contributes very little to no flavor as all to the batch. the HBU packs allow us to maintain consistency with the bitterness that is provided to the batch since hop alpha acids will fluctuate from season to season.”

“The HBU pack hops and weights will vary based on the alpha acid of the hop used. Currently we are using Northern Brewer hops for the HBU packs, and the weight will have to be taken for an accurate entry into the brewing software.”



Now, I don’t doubt that they know their stuff at Austin Homebrew, but my question is....Would it really not matter what type of hops you are putting in at 60 mins/beginning of boil? If not, why do all the beer recipes use different hop varieties? Would they all just use whatever is available? It just seems to me that it would contribute some to the flavor as well.


What are your thoughts on this?

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Would it really not matter what type of hops you are putting in at 60 mins/beginning of boil? If not, why do all the beer recipes use different hop varieties? Would they all just use whatever is available? It just seems to me that it would contribute some to the flavor as well.

Ooooh, this is a real can of worms!!! The short answer is that different hops do bitter in slightly different ways, but not everyone thinks those differences are significant and different people prefer different kinds of bitterness. So for instance Target is generally considered quite a rough bitterness - but a lot of people prefer that; whereas Fuller's are very insistent in using a blend of Challenger, Northdown and Target.

Historically, commercial breweries only valued hops by the amount of alpha acid they contained (ie potential bitterness) and so high alpha hops meant they got the same bang for less buck. Each country developed their own high-alpha hops and so you'll tend to see eg modern British recipes using Admiral, US recipes using Nugget, Germans using Magnum and so on - but there's also a bit of a kickback with some people going back to lower-alpha hops as they claim they taste better.

But in general aside from the bitterness there's not a lot of flavour molecules going to survive a 60 minute boil so there's not much point in wasting expensive aroma hops unless you happen to have some old ones kicking around.