Why should we add hops at different times?

[Kungpaodog]

From what I understand, the longer hops is boiled more alpha acids are isomerized lending the bitterness. Adding hops immediately after the boil should only add flavor and aroma (I think). At the other end of the scale dry hopping will add hop aroma with no bitterness. I think this is the basic description.

Since so many recipes call for 60 min, 30 min, 15 min, 5 min, etc, hop additions, there is obviously a reason for differently timed additions. What is happening during those different timed additions, and what do they each specifically add to the beer?

 

[Brewing Clamper]

Balancing between bittering, flavoring and aroma... check this out for some better info.

 

[surfbrewer]

You are right that the longer the hops are boiled the more bitterness you will extract from them, to a point anyway. That is why your 60-90 min. addition is considered your bittering addition. The later you add the hops the less bitterness you will get but you will still extract bitterness from them. This gives you different layers of hop character within your beer and lends to a more complex flavor profile.

A 30 min. addition will still give you some bittering but you will also start to gain some flavor components. This is true with all of your additions, it is just a matter of the timing and the effect that you are trying to achieve. As you make additions throughout the boil you will start gaining more flavor and aroma characteristics and start losing the bittering characteristics.

In short, it is meant to add depth and layers to your beer so that it is not simply one dimensional. Hope that helps.

Cheers

 

[CGengo]

Well, you pretty much answered your own question in your first paragraph. The different timing of the additions results in different utilization of the hop characteristics. A 30 minute hop addition will extract a good amount of bitterness from the hops but will also contribute to a nice hoppy flavor without imparting much smell. Likwise a 45 minute addition will result in more bitterness and less flavor and a 15 minute addition will result in less bitterness and more flavor and smell. It's just a sliding scale between bitterness, flavor, and smell.

 

[Laughing_Gnome_Invisible]

I am a very simple person, so let me over simplify this.

Just think about cooking a meal with pepper. If you add pepper at the start, you would expect the flavour of the pepper to infuse with the overall flavour of the finished dish. This works well, but when the meal is in front of you, you might wish to add extra pepper to the finished meal to give it a little extra zing, so that you get the taste of the pepper in a more raw manner, directly on the tongue. The later you add the pepper, the more defined the taste of the pepper. Dry hopping is similar to putting pepper directly onto the finished meal, while pepper added to the meal at the start would be the bittering pepper.

 

[the_bird]

As a side note, 30-minute additions make no sense to me. It's not long enough in the boil to maximize their bittering effect, but it's too long for there to be any material flavor components left (and aroma is LONG gone). There really isn't any flavor to speak of left after thirty minutes in the boil.

 

[Brewing Clamper]

As a side note, 30-minute additions make no sense to me. It's not long enough in the boil to maximize their bittering effect, but it's too long for there to be any material flavor components left (and aroma is LONG gone). There really isn't any flavor to speak of left after thirty minutes in the boil.

Wow, I thought the same thing, all the recipes that I found with 30min additions I recalculated for 60 & 15min additions.. I'm glad I wasn't just being weird in doing that.

 

[Tenchiro]

I like this chart for determining hop additions, it gives you a good idea of what to expect.

 

[Kungpaodog]

Nice chart!

I guess what I was really getting at was that I didn't really understand why not to make additions at just 60 or 15 minutes, and simplify complex recipes. I'm sure that some could tell the difference, but I doubt that my palate is refined enough to tell the difference between a recipe with five different additions or two. Thanks, all!

 

[carnevoodoo]

As a side note, 30-minute additions make no sense to me. It's not long enough in the boil to maximize their bittering effect, but it's too long for there to be any material flavor components left (and aroma is LONG gone). There really isn't any flavor to speak of left after thirty minutes in the boil.

This is an excellent point, especially with the rising cost of hops.

 

[david_42]

I really wish that chart would die. It is just about totally wrong.

 

[Fingers]

I really wish that chart would die. It is just about totally wrong.

It kind of seems that way to me too, David. Do you have something a little more accurate?

 

[pkmoose]

I really wish that chart would die. It is just about totally wrong.

For us new people, could you explain why it is wrong? Thanks

 

[david_42]

This is one of the better charts for hop utilization.

You can't really make a chart for aroma/flavor, because the boil-off of oils is a continuous process. You can say the lighter oils that provide aroma are boiled out by 15 minutes and the heavier flavor oils by 30 minutes.

 

[pjj2ba]

Nice Charts! I wish someone would develop a calculator for flavor and aroma additions based on the essentiol oil content. I think the standard IBU calculators should only be used for additions over 20 min. Of course then we'd need the oil contents labeled for the hop we buy, in addition to the AA levels. I don't know who much these vary compared to the AA content or whether we could just use the typical values for each hop (like guessing AA on homegrown hops). It seems riduculous to me to try and use an IBU calculator to try and decide how much late addition hops to add to get a flavor and aroma. It would be great to be able to reproducibly dial in oil additions, say I want 1 ml Myrcene, 0.5 ml Humulene and 2 ml of Farnesene from my hop additions. I could mix various hops to get those numbers .

Hmmm..... I do have a table with this information in Excel. Maybe I'll see what my lastest beers look like if I calculate these values.

 

[Tenchiro]

Thanks for providing the new chart and the explanation. I knew the chart I had linked was pretty simplified, but figured that it provided a good baseline for hop AA utilization. That is one thing about brewing that I need to read up more on.

 

[TeleTwanger]

I never had a problem estimating IBUs with the formula ozXaaX%Utilization/6.7 where U=25(60), 12.5(30), 6(15)...It works for me in that a 50IBU beer (1.050-60)tastes pretty bitter.

As far as aroma good luck trying to quantify that. FWHs which are in the boil the longest don't give off much bitterness but a lot of flavor/aroma the opposite of the standard formulas/charts.