Ruination? - Light beer! 90 minute? - Your time has run out! Pliny? - Please!
I hereby lay claim to having made the hoppiest beer in history! I welcome your stories to come knock me off my perch!
I turned 50 last week, and my party is Saturday. My wife turned 50 back in March, and she asked for an Orval clone for her party. (It came out really nice.) So back in March I was already thinking about what I should make. I knew it had to be a hop bomb, but what exactly to do? 50 years, 50 ibus? Nothing special there. How about: 50 ounces of hops? That’s right, I used 50 ounces of hops in one ten gallon batch of what I’m calling Hop50. I took my Double IPA recipe and increased the gravity a little, and started acquiring hops. Columbus, cascade, centennial, and simcoe. Despite being advised to cheat by using a bunch of low alpha hops to get to the 50 ounce level (I was offered 25 oz of 0.6% alpha Tettnang), I stuck with varieties appropriate for a Double Imperial. Mash hops, first wort hops, additions every 5 minutes, plus dry hops. It calculates to 362 ibu, but I’m well aware that this is way past the level of solubility for bitterness. The OG was 1.098, FG is 1.025. I ended up with about 7.5 gallons in the fermenter. I lost nearly three gallons to wetting the hops, and that’s using mostly pellets!
The finished beer is certainly the highest hop flavor I’ve ever experienced. However, the perceived bitterness is not as high as I expected. My wife says there’s so much going on there that you just can’t experience it all (she’s a BJCP Master, so she’s probably right). The aroma is strong, but not overpowering. If I could afford to do it again, I’d move more of the hops into dry hopping. The malt character (yes, it has detectable malt!) supports the beer really well. I wouldn’t change a thing there.
Finally, for the record, Siamese Moose is a new name for my on-line activities, and this is my first post under that name. I’ll send a party invite to the first person who names me! ;D
I thought I read on the Greenboard back before the mass exodus that someone had made a massively hopped beer with 10 pounds of hops. I think it was called 10 Cubed or Hop Cubed because of the other specifics of the beer. I’ll have to research this.
Wow, I had seen a recipe on The Brew Hut forum (forum for this years small brewery of the year GABF) that called for 24 oz of hops. I wanted to try it and that was before my full intro into the world of beer. I am a hop head and back then I was nuts…
Dale’s Pale from Oscar Blues (Lyons CO) has a punch you in the gut bitterness. I love it, but I can only tolerate about two or three cans of it before I call it quits.
The recipe? Well, 18’ pale malt, 1.5’ Caramel 20L, 1.5’ Munich 10L, mash at 151° for 90 minutes. Boil 90 minutes. 4’ corn sugar added at end of boil.
Hops:
4 oz Columbus pellets in mash
4 oz Columbus pellets first wort
4 oz Columbus pellets in 75 min.
2.5 oz Columbus pellets in 60 min.
1.5 oz Cascade pellets in at 50, 45, 40, 25, 15, 10, and 5 min., and at knockout
1.5 oz Centennial whole at 35, 30, 15, 10, and 5 min, and at knockout
1.5 oz. Simcoe whole at 20 min.
3 oz each Centennial whole, Simcoe whole, and Cascade pellets dry hops. These were put in sequentially (ie not all at the same time) for 5 days each.
1 gallon starter of Wyeast 1056 American Ale
OG 1.098
FG 1.025
10.0 % abv
I originally intended to use more Simcoe, but on brewday found out I did not have the unopened bag I thought I had. With a brewery named after a cat, I intended to get more “cat urine” in there.
The fact that this is drinkable is proof that you really can’t get any more than 100 IBUs in a beer. Good job, you are a braver man than me. I always like to see homebrewers doing stuff that is totally impractical for commercial brewers.
My buddy Hop God has been brewing a beer every year for a while on 12/25 that calculates out to 1225ibus. I believe it has about double the amount of hops listed in yours. Its all about mash temps and decoction
He’s also in Charlie Papazian’s book “Microbrewede Adventures”. I’m not sure the recipe is but there is a picture of the brew process and it looks like hop stew!
