mere cat

Brewing with Glacier Hops

So what did we do with all those hops? Well, in the spirit of Sly Fox’s Hop Project, we decided to brew a single-hop pale ale. We picked a simple pale ale recipe (“Gone Fishin’” from The Complete Joy of Home Brewing by Charlie Papazian). I was advised that fresh hops are equivalent to pellets, so we measured out the same amount by weight.

To get maximum hop extraction, we tried something called the Texas Two-Step, which splits the boil into two stages. Previously, we boiled 2.5 gallons of water and added all the ingredients to that, then added 2.5 gallons to the fermentation bucket. The Two-Step has you split your ingredients and add half to each 2.5-gallon boil. Even with that, the beer tasted weak and watery at first. Disappointing. Now that the beer has been in bottles for a few weeks it tastes much better, but it still has virtually no hop flavor. Either our hops are “weak,” or we didn’t use enough of them, or both, probably.

For our next batch (a Hoegaarden clone), we will be using pellet hops and adding some of our Glacier hops for aroma. Hoping this batch will be much better.