What Australian beers are good examples of a certain hop?

[hoppinmad]

Knappstein Reserve Lager with 100% Nelson Sauvin. Being a straight pilsner malt beer it really helps display all that Nelson Sauvin has to offer. Almost reminiscent of a sauvignon blanc wine with lychee, passionfruit and cut grass characters. Mouth watering stuff

 

[PeteQ]

Wicked Elf pale ale - Cascade hops

Possibly my favourite Australian beer at the moment but that changes on nearly a weekly basis...

 

[Yob]

Single hop beers? BAH!!

I wouldnt judge a hop (Citra is bloody lurvly :icon_drool2: ) by one miserable commercial beer tasting... a beer made by accountants (or even brewers with a fear of them) is never going to stand against a well made, rounded and ballanced home brewed craft beer.

While I often enjoy a commercial beer, (Think Hog and BP Big Eye) I dont think Ive ever sought out single hop beers ever... For me, I like complexity in a hop profile and you just cant get that with a single hop, somewhere between 2 and 6 is magic... half the fun is working out how much of what dances well with how much of what.. (and how often)

naturally... just my opinion though..

2 ha' pennys

 

[of mice and gods]

You're making our amateur brains melt Yob. I'm still working out the characteristics of individual hops utilised at different times and in different ways.. 6 at a time is a little further off for me. I do see where you're coming from though with the combos. Actually I have been thinking about doing a range of smash beers to get my head around some different malts and hops.. anyway.. I guess my house brew is a 6.5% Galaxy IPA so I've been melting myself on that for awhile happily but I want to explore more in a less mind bending kind of way.

Now, I've been having similar thoughts to the OP about differentiating flavours because it seems that some people are smelling/tasting a lot more then i am... although i am a smoker so i'll never be a world famous beer critic (which I do not want to be anyway!), But I want to see if I can identify these flavours a bit more.

So I bought the Bridge Roads Beer School Single Hop IPA pack today. Gonna go through them and see what happens.. (also grabbed a Feral Golden Ace to try Sorachi ace in an Australian beer).

Recommended tasting order that I'll follow is:
1. Summer
2. Vic Secret
3. Galaxy
4. Ella
*Note bitterness not shown, hop profile & malt profiel shown on bottle from 1 (mild) to 10 (extreme), so I'll give these.


1. Summer IPA 4.8% malt 5/10 hops 8/10
inscription: spice & fruit notes, hints of stonefruit & melon.
- ok, so i got the overall fruity nose, bit of grassiness(?) on the nose as well as flavour, mild mild citrus after.. couldn't get any stonefruit and i think the melon i ended up smelling was a placebo.

 

[Camo6]

Single hop beers? BAH!!

I wouldnt judge a hop (Citra is bloody lurvly :icon_drool2: ) by one miserable commercial beer tasting... a beer made by accountants (or even brewers with a fear of them) is never going to stand against a well made, rounded and ballanced home brewed craft beer.

While I often enjoy a commercial beer, (Think Hog and BP Big Eye) I dont think Ive ever sought out single hop beers ever... For me, I like complexity in a hop profile and you just cant get that with a single hop, somewhere between 2 and 6 is magic... half the fun is working out how much of what dances well with how much of what.. (and how often)

naturally... just my opinion though..

2 ha' pennys

Now you're just rubbing our noses in your variety of choice! I bet the hardest part of your brewday is choosing which of the 3,682,890 combinations of hops you could go with.

 

[anthonyUK]

I don't know what you were expecting from the Oakham Citra. It is pretty much a Citra SMASH so is never going to be overly complex and is an exercise in showcasing the hop (Oakham were apparently the first UK commercial brewer to use Citra).

Oakham do a version for Marks & Spencer in UK which is 4.9% instead of 4.2% and I like it.

I'm sorry I can't help with any Aussie beers but brewing SMASHs are a great way to isolate hop flavours.

 

[Yob]

Bah!! Only if you like one dimensional beer... Not a fan of SMASH beers... A bottle I can get through.. A keg of it bores me to tears..

Personal opinion naturally and tastes vary.

I don't believe many hops at all are great by themselves..

 

[fletcher]

i have to agree with yob, but only after having brewed a lot of single hop beers to get an idea on their tastes. i'm bored of that now apart from making one here and there for friends who aren't big craft brew drinkers. once you've done that and then start venturing into 2 and 3 hop beers, it's a lot of fun tasting them and seeing how they work together.

 

[of mice and gods]

..**** well that went well. I guess I should have had breakfast first and not topped up from the keg fridge.

From what I can remember now, the beers got increasingly more hopeforward as I went through the list. I remember thinking Vic Secret and Galaxy could be a nice combo. Very similar in taste and smell (to me) with a few slight nuances.. As for specific aromas and flavours I can't remember sorry.

I really enjoyed the Ella, so I'm gonna hunt down some of this for brewing.

The Feral Golden Ace was really nice. I haven't had mnay (any?) Golden Ales before so this was something new to me. It had that refreshing "noble-ish" aroma of a typical Sapporo. Vastly different from my normal run of APA/IPA but it was a really enjoyable, light refreshing beer. I'd definately go this again.

And ladies and gentlemen, that's what we call Science.

Al

 

[of mice and gods]

Yob, gives us a heads up mate. What's your favourite 3 hop combo for hopfoward beers?

 

[Yob]

Hard to go past the likes of...

Simcoe/mosaic/citra

Centennial/Citra/Amarillo

Cascade/Chinook/Mosaic (etc)

I will typically look to balance a pine type with a fruit type, to try and get the complex play of flavours.

The list go's on...

 

[jaypes]

Murrays Angry Man = Pacifica + Motueka = Drool

I am also with Fletcher in regards to POR, I brewed a megaswill for a mate but loaded the POR - turned out to be an OK beer - **** all flavour but a nice aroma.

19L gone in 2 weeks - he must have liked it as well

 

[bmarshall]

Epic zythos.
Liberty savignon bomb.
Yum.
Didnt know wicked elf was just cascade. Good beer.

 

[bmarshall]

Red duck have new single hop ipa "bobcat" with simcoe.

 

[adryargument]

Red duck have new single hop ipa "bobcat" with simcoe.

Red duck.... Port macquarie or is that Black Duck?
Will have to visit them when i drive past for xmas, great bowling lane tables.

 

[bmarshall]

Red duck.... Port macquarie or is that Black Duck?
Will have to visit them when i drive past for xmas, great bowling lane tables.

To quote red duck news letter.
We are making the slow transition
to 500ml bottles for all our
Limited Releases: The first ale
to appear in this format will be
Bobcat American IPA 7.5%, a
single hop brew, using Simcoe.
Bobcat has been bottled and
should be out prowling around
soon.

There in Ballarat.

 

[TimT]

Yob, don't you find that in multi-hop beers some of the flavours will tend to cancel one another out? I suspect that hop selection has to be very careful to avoid this sort of thing happening.

Hops are a beautiful thing, it's true, but next year I want to try a lot of herbal brewing. So my quest over the summer/Christmas break will be to find out good bittering substitutes for hops.

 

[pat86]

I don't know what you were expecting from the Oakham Citra. It is pretty much a Citra SMASH so is never going to be overly complex and is an exercise in showcasing the hop (Oakham were apparently the first UK commercial brewer to use Citra).

Oakham do a version for Marks & Spencer in UK which is 4.9% instead of 4.2% and I like it.

I'm sorry I can't help with any Aussie beers but brewing SMASHs are a great way to isolate hop flavours.

I am happy I put down the bottle of Oakham Citra yesterday and grabbed a Mikeller Bravo instead. I thought it was great but haven't tried their others yet

 

[Yob]

Yob, don't you find that in multi-hop beers some of the flavours will tend to cancel one another out? I suspect that hop selection has to be very careful to avoid this sort of thing happening

I've mentioned this elsewhere I think but as with all things beer it's all about a balance, you need the right malt profile and the right hop profile, I always try to balance fruity hops with piney type hops, Citra and Simcoe as an example, Calypso and cascade etc etc, there aren't many hops out there (IMO) that do it all by themselves (Citra, Simcoe and mosaic are examples of ones that do) but again, you really want to be getting the additions right.

The last case swap I went to, I took a keg that had been in the keg for 3 days and keg hopped for 2 of them.. It was demolished.. I think from memory it was a 3 hop blend, I don't think I could have got away with that with any one of those on their own.

3 days to condition a 5% APA is pretty bloody good (2 weeks from grain to brain)

 

[carniebrew]

Epic zythos.
<snip>

Calling Zythos a single hop beer is kinda cheating...given it's a proprietary blend of hops targeted for use in APA/IPA's...