This is my first time growing hops and the little flowers are just starting to form.
I was wondering if anyone had any ale style suggestions I could utilize my Hallertau Mittelfrüh hops with. I’m not expecting a large year for its first ever season. My ideas so far:
-Roggenbier (basically a Hefeweizen but with rye instead of wheat)
-Green hopping a one gallon batch
-Hop Tea in my French Press (saw people using it in place of dry hopping)
I hate pilsners and I figured I could be more greater than just an American Pale Ale. Thank you for any ale style suggestions
Let's go back to first principles :
- The whole thing of green/wet hops is that they're not dried.
- Drying hops evaporates many of the delicate flavour/aroma chemicals
- So green/wet hops retain those delicate chemicals
- But heating to whirlpool temperatures will cause some of those chemicals to evaporate
- Boiling green/wet hops will cause more of the chemicals to evaporate
- As has been mentioned, homegrown hops are a bit of a lottery for bittering, as you don't know the % alpha acids, although you can estimate it by tasting a hop tea in comparison with teas made from hops of known aa content. Or you can get an idea just by looking at local commercial hops to see if it's a high-alpha vintage or not
So as you can see, you make the most of green/wet hops by using them cold, and there's diminishing returns to using them as you go hotter and boil longer. So if you only have a few, you just want to use them as dry hops, and work backwards from the end of the brew as you get a bigger crop. Also if they don't all ripen at the same time, it can work to harvest some for brewday and then harvest the rest for dry hopping a week later.
Another point to make is that hops are 85% water, so you need a *lot* more green/wet hops to provide the same amount of flavouring as dried hops. In the UK brewers typically use 7x the green hops as dried, in the US people seem to use a little less, maybe 5-6x. And in your first year you might only get 100g/4oz of wet off your bine, so the equivalent of 15g/0.6oz dried hops, enough to play with but not for serious brewing.
So this first year, you're not really looking to make beer, you're just learning about your new ingredient. Knowing your ingredients will help you make much better beer in the long term, so it's worth being patient at this stage. So I wouldn't get hung up on making a "style".
I would just make a really clean, simple beer that shows off the new ingredient to its best advantage. So nothing adding complex flavours like rye, I would just go for a gallon or two (5-10l) of a really basic wort of say 1.045 of 100% pale/pilsner malt, 30 IBU of whatever bittering hops you have to hand and ferment with a clean yeast - 34/70, US-05, BRY-97 or whatever you have to hand. Then bottle a couple of bottles, and add the hops to the remainder for a few days. Then bottle and compare with the non-dry-hopped version to the dry-hopped version.
Personally I would split the batch and dry-hop half with the homegrown hops and half with commercial dried Mittelfruh to help understand the difference between green/wet hops and dried hops.
In the unlikely event that you have enough hops this year, you can split the wort and whirlpool half of it with homegrown hops, to see what they contribute at hotter temperatures, remembering that you need 7x as much compared to normal recipes.
And if you need to call it something, call it a "harvest ale". Whatever you call it, it's about the hops, and not fitting a "style".
[and whilst on the subject of German hops, I hope all HBTers in Germany & the Low Countries are OK, the pictures of the floods have looked horrendous]
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