Balance is the key to a really good IPA and very few people get it right. Most craft brewed ipas that I have had are downright terrible. They've managed to make them bitter, no getting around that. But very often the beers just suck.
Hop Management in the kettle and fermenter is the art that needs skills developed. I've made in one case the best IPA I've ever tasted, and made that same recipe multiple times and I dumped it. So I don't claim to have all the answers, but there's attention to detail that needs dealt with. Imho, you really need a lower ph in the mash and in my opinion you can't use lactic. Phosphoric or bust. You can't let ANY hop matter get into the fermenter. Get it cold in the kettle and settle it out, take the clearest wort you can and throw the rest away. If it spends 2 weeks on those hop solids you may as well just dump it before you put it in the fermenter.
In my opinion, I think far too many people accept IBU numbers as gospel and don't consider that there are many things coming from those hops. You can make beer with absolutely massive hop flavor without it being harsh. I think several of the keys must be counterintuitive because when I go back to my notes and try to make an improvement upon such beers I often times make them worse. So what I think is a common sense change clearly isn't a common sense change.
I have often told this analogy to with respect to hops in brewing. Think of when you eat celery. Some parts of the celery are really flavorful, mild and delicious, other parts very harsh. And even if you eat the really delicious parts and simply keep chewing, eventually you get down to the fibrous pieces which are considerably more harsh. The same thing happens with hops. When you first begin extraction you get really wonderful hop flavor. If you keep going too long, you get horrifying harsh bitterness. I've had that with numerous craft brewed ipas and it's to the point I don't even want to try anybody else's crap anymore. Brewing software doesn't care which one it is, hop flavor or bitterness, it just calls it ibus. If you don't believe that, taste your wort 2 minutes after you throw the first bittering hops in. I don't care if you've got 8 oz of Magnum in there, it'll still taste great. But don't give 8 oz of that another 2 minutes. LOL
Something in my brewing process doesn't lend itself well to IPA anymore. I've more or less stopped trying to figure it out because I just can't drink the high gravity beers anymore. That and the sheer cost of the beers at $50 a 5 gallon kit. Since 2018 I've dumped three $100 batches of Pliny the Elder kits and one $100 batch of Blind Pig. All 4 of those were superior to a number of beers I've paid good money for someone else to make. I'm going back to 5 gallon batches before I do any more experimenting with it, that's for sure.
Topic: Hop Tolerance/burnout ? (Read 662 times)
