So me and my wife like to do the hop experiment where we put a couple pallets of new hops we haven’t tried into some bottles of Bud light for a couple days, cold Crash, and then smell and taste.
Tonight we did Idaho 7 among others. We were both so surprised at how onion/garlic this hop especially smelled, but also tasted. Those descriptors were nowhere in any of the websites that I looked at. It was overwhelmingly strong. Anyone else have this opinion?
I have never got any onion or garlic from Idaho 7. There have been some people around here who say that onion/garlic can come from when the hops were picked. I think it was if they were picked late they can have that aroma and flavor.
I haven’t experienced Idaho 7 hops yet myself. Some hops do produce onion or garlic flavors. When this happens, often times a few months of aging will mellow this character or make it disappear.
Harvesting too late is the cause of the elevated onion/garlic. Growers try and time it right, but they can’t pick and process everything at once.
Large breweries do select their be lots first, so unless they want that flavor, that lot is left on the table
Yep, like Jeff said, it isn’t necessarily a trait of the hops. It’s due to late harvest.
Dave, it’s not the hops, it’s the harvest.
Interesting, it was an overwhelming smell and taste. My wife actually thought I was playing a joke on her and put crushed garlic into the bottle.
I guess I might try again with a different batch to see what it really taste like.
so were Summit hops late harvested? The consensus seemed to be that half the people got the citrus/tangerine out of it and the other half got onion/garlic/beef broth. I was unfortunately in the latter group. And all the beers I tried back then tasted like onion/beef broth… even from the larger craft breweries. I can’t prove its a late harvest thing but I would counter that its more than that. Everybody’s taste buds are different. We’re not all going to taste the same thing. But it sure pisses me off that these hop vendors are not giving any indication of what would be considered an ‘off flavor’.
I would say this is correct.
Some were. The Summits gotten were great with no hint of onion or garlic. It’s not the job of hop vendors to decide what’s an off flavor. They just put the hops out there and brewers decide.
I find it hard to believe for all the testing they do before releasing a new hop variety no one ever got onion/garlic flavor… shady.
This makes sense. Thank you.
Guess you ought to go to Hop and Brew School and learn how things work.
Certainly! Hope you can make it to Hop and Brew School some day. There’s a wealth of info.
I didn’t mean that to be as snarky as it sounds…assume it’s a suggestion without the snark intended.
I doubt that any vendor wants to be hung with a labeled “defective” product, but as with any food product, only a fewhops in a lot can be efficiently sampled. I wouldn’t put it all on the originating hop farmer, but rather this goes back to the much discussed priority of the picking - homebrewers aren’t high on that list, unfortunately.
But they don’t pick hops for homebrewers separately. They pick everything at once. Every bale that comes in gets sampled. Homebrewers get the same hops that commercial brewers do.
Just ordered more hops from different supplier.
Will try again and see if it is harvest, or my taste buds.
Depends on what farm they came from
Like others have said, it’s the harvest timeframe, not the hop itself. The upshot is that it’s very easily identifiable before you put it in your beer–WYSIWYG, i.e. what you smell is what you get. If you smell it, don’t use it, unless you want that character in your beer. I’ve had plenty of commercial IPAs that were nothing but onion/garlic in aroma and flavor, so it’s not just homebrewers that get sent these hops.