Hop Tea Vs Dry Hopping

[katzke]

My Wife brewed an American Black IPA for our club competition. It did not do well as a black as it was judged against the other odd beers including smoked beers. As an IPA it may have not done any better.

We were short of time and instead of adding dry hops we elected to try a hop tea. We added 1 ounce of American Cascades and 1 ounce of Amarillo. It got hammered for not having enough hop presence. All the advice was it was a good brew but needed more hop flavor and aroma and we should have dry hopped it. I can agree with the advice. The problem comes with age.

The hop tea seemed to kick in weeks after the competition. Only 1 bottle left and if it is like the last it will have a very prominent citrus grapefruit flavor. A possible winner in the competition. Definitely a different beer.

Has any one else noticed a difference in the long term flavor of hop tea verses dry hopping. All of our past brews have had a distinct drop in hop flavor. It has made no difference if we late hoped or dry hopped. The first beers from a batch were great and the later beers were lacking in hop flavor.

We just put about the same beer in a fermentor and plan on dry hopping and adding hop tea. We hope the dry hopping will give it the early punch and the hop tea will kick in when the dry hops start to fade.

As a side benefit to hop teas, I have used the left over hops in 2 wheat beers for bittering hops. We just froze the wet hops from the French Press. I am not sure how one would use hops leftover from dry hoping.

So anyone else have similar results with hops teas kicking in later as the beer ages?

 

[RdeVjun]

Very interesting observations, and my commiserations.

In my house ESB (a TTL with Styrian Goldings) I've usually dry hopped or added hop tea, but generally not both, so I can't really add much more but have to say I've had similar suspicions and I would concur with your own findings about changes in hop character after some cellaring. It does seem to be a particularly frustrating and painstakingly long- winded process of determining the right balance of late kettle, dry and/ or tea hops, and that's with only one variety. However, one common refrain with mine is that the hops character usually get much better only when there's only a couple of bottles left...!!

I can see why you'd do both, however one thing about the hop tea (and variants) and dry hop character is that one method is not really a sub for the other and the timing is quite important, IMO at least. They do have considerable overlap though and one is not better or worse than the other, they're just slightly different. BribieG may have more to add when he gets back from Chappo Manor?

BTW, I also re- use French- pressed (coffee plunger) hops for bittering in a subsequent beer, seems to work fine- waste not, want not! B)