Hops, Noble, Harvesting, unknown AA's - how do you roll?

[droid]

That's pretty much it. So lucky to be getting the chance to be in on a small harvest collaboration brew of Perle, Hersbrucker, Hallertau and Saaz (spelling nazi's can jump all over that)

but...the AA's are unknown and I've never used flowers before either

I'ts going to be a Euro Lager of some sort. My thoughts were to get close to the bottom end of the range in ibu's with some magnum that I have which is a known quantity and then freestyle it from there? Would we have an option on the night before when we arrive to make some kind of tea and determine the bitterness?

What say yee mad feckers that brew away and don't know what the AA's are?

 

[earle]

I use commercial hops of known IBU for my bitterness addition, aiming on the low side of what I want the overall bitterness to be. Use my home grown hops for late aroma and flavour additions where the impact of unknown AA's will have less affect.

 

[manticle]

Get them tested by smurto or lyrebird.

 

[Danscraftbeer]

You can confidently use them (throw in handfuls) in Hop stands or dry hopping without having to worry about the AA value.
I learned for the finished beer only that they seemed lower AA than the standard range.
Eg. Cascade used all the way on an Harvest IPA was great flavour but definitely lower than the software calculations.

Cascade wet. set at 1.75 AA
Cascade dry.set at 7 AA

Victoria dry set at 8.5 AA.

It was pretty close but other factors between different growing condition in different locations basically take that info with a grain of salt. Surely some home grown hops must sway to the higher AA variation too. Unless there is some kind of trick to commercial brewing that dictates they will always be at the higher AA levels???

 

[droid]

Get them tested by smurto or lyrebird.

Kym, (with the hops) is up at his place at the moment. We're not doing this for 6 weeks, It would be nice to run the home grown all the way through.

 

[manticle]

From memory, they're looking at testing beer, not hops but you could work backwards (1040 wort, 2 L, boiled 60 mins with 10g for example

 

[droid]

^yep, I'm hearing ya