Worst malt + hop pairings (SMaSH)

[Werner]

So I'm building plans for my next few all grain biab adventures, and I want to stick to simple recipes, have been playing around with BeerSmith and got me wondering... Are there any "hell no" SMaSH malt + hop combinations? Not talking adding a pound of hops to a 2 gallon recipe but just simply malt and hops characteristics that just don't play nice with taste buds.

 

[RPh_Guy]

Everyone has different tastes. What someone else hates, you might love.

For example, I would never make a beer with 100% roasted barley.

 

[Werner]

Was thinking more along the line of combinations of the standard malt catalog and the aisle of hops available these days that surely some combinations are going to produce strongly out of norm characteristics. Much like you don't mix strongly sour with strongly bitter when cooking as your only flavor profile for a meal. And as malts and hops have a spectrum of flavours (like some hops are peppery, some more floral, or pastoral) it begs to think that some of the pantry just isn't going to play well together for a 'normal' experience.

 

[BrewnWKopperKat]

Much like you don't mix strongly sour with strongly bitter when cooking as your only flavor profile for a meal. And as malts and hops have a spectrum of flavours (like some hops are peppery, some more floral, or pastoral) it begs to think that some of the pantry just isn't going to play well together for a 'normal' experience.

Beer styles may have a fair amount of this information already "built in". If I were to look into this this deeper, I'd start with the book Mastering Homebrew (today it appears to be $1.20 in eBook format), follow the author in various podcasts, and branch out based on what I learn.

Are there any "hell no" SMaSH malt + hop combinations?

The bad combinations apparently exist (see Chapter 3 in For the Love of Hops, but note that the book doesn't 'name names').

For classic "C" hops, clone recipes for commercial craft beer would appear to be a safe starting point for single hop beers (SNPA for Cascade, Two Hearted for Centennial, Psuedo Sue for Citra). I haven't looked for other single hop beers, but I would suspect that the good combinations are being sold.

Finally, there are at least three blogs roughly named "Hop Whisperer". This one http://hopwhisperer.blogspot.com/ may be the most useful. The approach for 'single hop' (vs SMaSH beers) is common, but often gets lost in the stream of people who are new to and excited about SMaSH brewing.

For a 2018 take on small batch SMaSH beers, take a look at Basic Brewing Radios "Hop Sampler". With Munich and Vienna DME available, it's practical to move from SMaSH to single hop using this technique.

 

[SanPancho]

Ill give you one. Smoked wheat and polaris.

Like drinking an australian bush fire- Eucalyptus and smoke.

 

[bpgreen]

Any hop that lists black currant as an aroma. That smells like cat urine to me.