Hop Flavour mellowing significantly?

[ercol]

Afternoon,

Just a quick one - I understand that hop flavour will mellow over time however having made a Landlord Clone (from GW's book) and infact mistakenly adding a third MORE hops than necessary i've found the end result after a couple of weeks in the bottle is lacking the 'hop punch' of the real thing - something made all the more curious as having tried it post-boil it was so hoppy i cannot describe, and post ferment it was still pretty erm....hoptastic.

So in the interests of understanding - has anyone experienced this/got an explanation? It leads me to wonder if it mellows from WAY too much to not much there at all in the space of 3 weeks, how the hell do they make the ludicrous american super-ipa's? Is it all in the dry hopping?

Thanks,

[jonnyt]

Interesting thoughts. I made the same brew as my first AG for 20 years. Due to not understanding that GWs book doesn't count late hops towards IBU and Brewmate does I cut down my hops by around 25%.

After boil and cooling the wort tasted remarkably Landlordish. So much so I was gobsmacked.

I have tasted today after around 9 days conditioning and the hop punch really isn't as strong as I'd like, though given I've underdone the hops it's hardly surprising so like you I think the hop flavour has mellowed over time.

I've decided I'm going to make another batch in the New Year, this time I'm going to treat my water after discovering alkalinity is around 136 rather than the required 20 to 30 which I understand can reduce hop flavour.

After that I'm going for Mysterio's SNPA which is really hoppy!

[Lugsy]

The first few brews I made from recipes suffered the same underwhelming hoppiness that you're describing, especially when I attempted hop-forward beers. I ended up lowering my hop utilisation in Beer Engine and now I'm getting more like the hop presence I'm after. I've recently read in some older discussions of BIAB that there is more protein carried from the mash to the kettle than using traditional three vessel (where more of the proteins are trapped in the settled grain bed) and these bond with the hop oils in the kettle to settle out as trub in the fermenter, taking some of the hop flavour out of the finished beer (I must stress though that this is from some of the older discussions of the technique and could be complete nonsense). I think it's all about getting used to your system and adjusting recipes as necessary to suit your tastes, the bad news is you'll have to brew a LOT more beers to get it right - all in the name of "research" of course

As far as the American style IPA's go, you just have to use a shed load of hops and most of them are much higher in alpha acids than the English hops too! As far as I remember, I used about 100g of hops in a TTL clone with low (5% or so) AA, my American pales have more like 150 - 200g of hops with two or three times the AA content and a hefty dry hop too

[ercol]

Appreciate the responses Gentlemen - Thankfully it is still a very pleasant brew and my most accomplished so far so i am not too upset. Nor am i at the prospect of having to make many more to try to crack it

If theres any truth to the hop oils in the trub theory that would be very interesting though - although thinking back in comparison to the other couple i've done lately i was surprised at how little trub there was - next to nothing in fact, and the result - a crystal clear beer. That does of course not mean there aren't numerous things going on i cannot see though!