NoChill again..

[aamcle]

I thought I had been it but the links were prior to the forum upgrade and don't work.

There is a good thread somewhere explaining what to do when the beer has late hops, if you would post the link I'd appreciate it.

Thanks. aamcle

 

[mje1980]

If I do add late hops I add as normal. You can put them in the cube, wait til the wort drops to 80c, then cube to reduce bitterness. It’s trial and error more than anything.

I usually prefer dry hopping for aroma and flavour these days, so generally just do bittering hops. I also occasionally do 10 minute beers.One addition at 10 minutes to go in the boil. I cube those beers and find them great in regards to flavour aroma and bitterness.


You’ll find many different approaches, pick one and see.

Yeast strain can make just as big a difference in terms of hoppiness of your beer.

 

[shacked]

As a general rule of thumb, you subtract 15 mins from your schedule. So hops that go in at 15m when you are chilling you add at 0 mins.

Anything <15 mins you can either add into the cube and transfer your wort over to the cube after (say) a 20 min hot whirlpool [which is what I do] or you can let it cool a little more before cubing per MJE's note above.

Another option is to not put any late hops into your cube or boil. On the day you pitch your yeast, take 4L out of your cube, bring it to a boil and do your late additions in a mini boil. Then combine and pitch yeast. If you refrigerate your cube before this process then you may not even have to chill your mini boil at all. (4L at 100C + 18L at 4C = 21C so not too far off pitching temp depending on your yeast strain).

Either way, lots of trial and error await you!!

 

[JDW81]

There’s 2 methods I’ve used with great success to get good late hop character into my cubed beers (and I’ve only ever used the no chill method since I start AG brewing).

1: The Argon method: Described above, but essentially a mini boil with some wort from the cube (4-5L), to which you add your late hops and boil for the designated period of time. You can either chuck them in commando (which is what I did), or use a hop sock/spider. You then chill the mini boil in an ice bath and combine with the rest of the cube (or chill the whole cube and add the hot wort to the cold - not something I ever did)

2: Add most of your hops straight into the cube. Works fantastically. You add a small amount of hops to the boil (say 20-30% of your calculated IBUs) to help form a trub cone. You then add the rest of the hops into the cube to bring it up to your IBUs. You can end up adding a lot of hops (I’ve put 150-200g into the cube before). I calculate it as either a 10 or 15 minute addition depending on which cubes I use. You end up with a really smooth bitterness, great hop flavour and aroma (kinda hard to describe the outcome, unless you actually try it). Very similar to what a lot of breweries are doing with their hazy pale ales, adding most of the hops late.

JD

 

[contrarian]

The above advice is certainly sound and cube hopping is a great way to end up with different beers from the same wort or to try different hops to see what they bring from the same base but I'm not a massive fan of what they leave behind in the cube.

For hoppy beers I generally use a very small bittering addition, around 0.5g/L and then a large addition into the whirlpool where after flame out I have let the kettle temperature drop to around 85C but definitely under 90 and then whirlpool and stand for about 30 minutes, then dry hop for aroma. I find that this gives me the best results in terms of flavour and bitterness.

For other beers that don't have massive late additions like a pilsner or lager I normally just go with a bittering addition and a 15 minute addition with a ratio of 1:2 and quantity depending on aa%. Often for these beers you are working with low aa% hops and lower IBUs which, in my experience, are much more forgiving!

In my experience there isn't any brewing software that adequately deals with the complexity of hop additions from flame out onwards and so you really need to have a play with it and come up with something that produces the results that you like and is repeatable.

 

[elmoMakesBeer]

The above advice is certainly sound and cube hopping is a great way to end up with different beers from the same wort or to try different hops to see what they bring from the same base but I'm not a massive fan of what they leave behind in the cube.

For hoppy beers I generally use a very small bittering addition, around 0.5g/L and then a large addition into the whirlpool where after flame out I have let the kettle temperature drop to around 85C but definitely under 90 and then whirlpool and stand for about 30 minutes, then dry hop for aroma. I find that this gives me the best results in terms of flavour and bitterness.

For other beers that don't have massive late additions like a pilsner or lager I normally just go with a bittering addition and a 15 minute addition with a ratio of 1:2 and quantity depending on aa%. Often for these beers you are working with low aa% hops and lower IBUs which, in my experience, are much more forgiving!

In my experience there isn't any brewing software that adequately deals with the complexity of hop additions from flame out onwards and so you really need to have a play with it and come up with something that produces the results that you like and is repeatable.

I also add late hops to the whirlpool and stand before cubing. This adds more bitterness than chilling rapidly after adding whirlpool hops. I know many people go for fruit-juice-tasting IPAs, but personally I prefer a decent kick of bitterness in my IPAs so that's how I brew them - I also add hops at the start of boil for bittering, as well as late in the boil.

You mention that no software adequately deals with late hop additions. I'm not aware of any quantifiable measure of hop flavour/aroma, but Petr Novotny has come up with a rational method of quantifying the bitterness from late additions. Unfortunately the posts on his site explaining the theory are all in Czech, but he translated his spreadsheet and it's quite usable. You might want to have a look.
IBU Spreadsheet – English version

The link below has his four posts explaining the theory - it's pretty hard reading, even with Google translate
Diversity - Petr Novotný

 

[aamcle]

Many Thanks.

Sorry I was late replying.