I’ve made several batches of IPA following given recipes closely. I’ve use required amount of hops and even tried dry hopping. All batches result total lack of hop profile? Other flavor profiles great but no hoppieness and little bite? Why ?
What recipes? Fresh ingredients or Mr beer kits
What hops/qty/boil time/whirlpool??
Without seeing the recipes,
1/ Mashing IPA at 5.4 pH helps with hop expression.
2/ Using some gypsum in the boil or mash helps hop character pop.
3/ Recipes with a high percentage of crystal malt (if not balanced) can have a sweetness that can cover up some of the hop character. See Hopslam.
4/ May need to simply add more hops to suit your tastes.
From what I understand
adjusting your water chemistry makes the hops shine.
I brewed the same IPA recipe several times and never got the bitterness I wanted until switching to RO water and adding minerals to build the profile from scratch. Same recipe but different water chemistry. I used the pale ale profile on Bru’n Water. Approximately 300ppm sulfite and 40ppm chloride IIRC.
I agree your water is the likely culprit here but without knowing the water source or anything about the recipes used it’s hard to say. Other equally valid explanations would be old ingredients, inferior recipes, wrong yeast choice, or a combination of several factors.
Wrong yeast is a probability I didn’t consider, as some yeasts are not as friendly to hop aroma but bitterness is usually prominent
Examples?
1056 hop forward beer - increasing the hop characters/aromas
vs say
Burton Ale - full body, malty, smooth and mellowed bitterness
vs
wlp099 fruity characters that increase with higher gravity beers. Malt character dominates at lower gravities.
I guess I can’t say that the yeast is damaging to the hops themselves as they give a less balanced hop forward presence in certain beers.