Aged Hops Homebrew Experiment - Recipe and Results

Inspired by a snippet from Scott Janish’s The New IPA, and with a heap of hops hanging around, we decided to age some El Dorado hops and brew them to see how they affected our beer. Aging hops changes the amounts of oils and other components of hops, including myrcene which is volatile and easily degraded over time. Often we love myrcene for its spicy and floral flavors, but what if aging the hops gives us the more fruity flavors we desire for an IPA? That’s where the idea came in, and why we chose to use El Dorado hops, one of the more modern, fruity, and high myrcene hops (about 55% of total oil). Janish even explains in his book (worth the read, by the way) how some brewers actually go and select hops from growers that have greater levels of oxidation, a.k.a. They select hops that have been sitting the longest.

So, without getting too technical, we thought we might be able to increase the fruity aroma and flavor in our El Dorado single-hop IPA by aging our hops for 4 weeks and 8 weeks, but first, we started with our control recipe.

Recipe:

Malt

• 2-Row - 34 oz (85% of mash)

• Caramel 15L - 4 oz (10%)

• Carapils - 2 oz (5%)

As easy as it gets. We kept the caramel notes light for summer and we added Carapils to increase body and head retention. We mashed our malt in 3.5 quarts of water at 150℉ for one hour and then sparged with one gallon of 170℉ water. We collected that sweet, sweet wort and moved onto the one-hour boil. Time for some hops!

Now, before we go to the boil, I think it’s time to be honest about this beer--it has more than one hop in it. BUT for good reason. We bought a two-ounce back of El Dorado hops to make two pale ales out of. The first one (this one) will be brewed fresh, and the ones that follow will be brewed with aged El Dorado hops. We chose to use Magnum hops at the start of the boil to get a consistent bittering without a lot of added extra flavor in order to see the effect of aging on the flavor and aroma of the El Dorado hops compared to its bittering qualities, which decrease with aging. But, El Dorado, with its high alpha-acid is a fantastic bittering hop, so don’t be afraid to use it as such in your own beer, but watch those IBUs or you’ll have one bitter beer.

Now, onto the boil!

Boil

• Magnum - 0.1 oz at the start (60 minutes)

• El Dorado - 0.33 oz with 15 minutes remaining

• Irish moss clarifier (optional) - ⅕ tsp with 15 minutes remaining

• El Dorado - 0.33 oz at flameout (0 minutes)

• El Dorado - 0.33 oz dry-hopped 3-5 days after start of fermentation.

We then cooled the beer and added 4 grams of preactivated Cali yeast from CellarScience (4 grams yeast in 40 ml of 95-105℉ water for 20-30 minutes) and let it ferment for two weeks to let all those delicious yeast and hop oils dance together. Then we added 0.85 oz of corn sugar for priming (skip this if you keg), bottled it (yield: 10 bottles), and waited another grueling two weeks.

Now for the fun. Here’s our first impressions of our fresh El Dorado single-hop Pale Ale!

Results:

• On the Eyes--Golden and hazy with a one-finger cream-colored head that maintained pretty well. We have Carapils to thank for that.

• On the Nose--Mild citrus (tangerine), tropical fruit (pineapple), and melon (watermelon/honeydew) jump out first. A malt sweetness lingers as well, promising good balance (fingers crossed). Onto the taste!

• On the Palate--Soft mouthfeel (thank you again Carapils), with notes of citrus, melon, and stone fruit being the most prominent flavors. Pineapple is present, but subtle, adding its own sweetness. The beer as a whole is juicy sweet, though not cloyingly so, and balanced nicely with the gentle malt flavor from the Caramel 15L. The soft mouthfeel is very pleasant in this medium-bodied ale and the effervescence is right where we like it with just a little bite. More El Dorado without an accompanying hop might be a little too sweet for me, though maybe not for other brewers. The Magnum did its job, as always, and gave us a consistent, clean bitterness. Again, El Dorado is a fantastic dual-purpose hop and can be used for bittering by those wishing to try.

We were very pleased with the results of this fresh out of the package single-hop IPA, and were excited (though rather impatient) to see how the hops aged at 4 and 8 weeks would change the results. But first…

How we aged our hops:

To age our hops we opened the package and stored it in the fridge compared to the freezer, and once a week we took the package out and exposed the hops to oxygen for ten minutes. We then returned the hops to the fridge and repeated the process once a week for the rest of the remaining time, four weeks or eights, until our hops were ready for brewing.

So, using the same recipe for each of our aged hops, here are the results of the experiment.

Results:

To test if we could tell the difference in the beers, Mrs. Brew and I set up a blind taste test with the fresh hop beer, the 4 week aged hop beer, and the 8 week aged hop beer. There was a difference between the beers, that much is for certain, but each had qualities we enjoyed and each had things we didn’t like as much.

Overall, our favorite was the four week aged hop beer. It had the sweetest aroma and the most descriptive and distinct El Dorado flavor. It was fruity and light and a joy to drink. The control beer, or the fresh hop beer if you will, was the most vegetal beer, and this makes sense when considering how the myrcene (the source of our ‘green’ flavors) would have been at its highest levels fresh out of the package. It tasted great, but it lacked aroma where the four week beer shined.

The eight week beer had the strongest aroma, but it had the least appealing flavor, which, for many scientific reasons unnecessary to put here, Janish warned might happen with aged hops because they have a tendency to create that unappealing kettle hop flavor. So hops aged this long would be better in the whirlpool or in a dry-hop situation.

So, with the results we gathered, the best beer outcome is to use fresh hops to make your early bittering and flavoring additions, use the four week aged hops for flavoring and aroma additions, and use the eight week aged hops for whirlpool and dry-hop additions to get the strongest aroma.

Of course, we kid you, but what a fun experiment anyway. Obviously, we are not scientists, and there are a number of factors that will affect the flavor, including yeast age and selection, the time the beer spent in the fridge, length of time since bottling, and so on and so forth, but this experiment did open our eyes to the ways we can use hops, and even utilize hops that have been sitting in the freezer for a while, to the best of their abilities.

Conduct your own experiment to see what results you come up with.

Brew on, and keep experimenting, because that’s what it’s all about.

Cheers!

Mr. Brew