SMaSH and the quantity of hops - question

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BernardSmith

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There is a lovely approach to brewing known as SMaSH (single malt and single hop) where the idea is that you get to know more about how different malts and hops interact by brewing under very controlled conditions where all you use is one base malt and one variety of hop and you vary either the base malt from batch to batch or the hop variety.

My spring (brewing) project is to make a number of batches of beer using Maris Otter as my malt and varying the hops from one batch to the other to get a better handle on the kinds of flavors specific hops can impart.

OK. My question is given that my plan is to make several one gallon batches (I know, I know: all that work for 10 bottles of beer!) how much hops should I be adding? I am thinking 1 oz per gallon (assuming .5 oz for bittering .25 flavor and .25 aroma) but is that quantity way off base?
 
There is a lovely approach to brewing known as SMaSH (single malt and single hop) where the idea is that you get to know more about how different malts and hops interact by brewing under very controlled conditions where all you use is one base malt and one variety of hop and you vary either the base malt from batch to batch or the hop variety.

My spring (brewing) project is to make a number of batches of beer using Maris Otter as my malt and varying the hops from one batch to the other to get a better handle on the kinds of flavors specific hops can impart.

OK. My question is given that my plan is to make several one gallon batches (I know, I know: all that work for 10 bottles of beer!) how much hops should I be adding? I am thinking 1 oz per gallon (assuming .5 oz for bittering .25 flavor and .25 aroma) but is that quantity way off base?
There are lots of different directions you could go. What style of beer are you after? Did you have a particular strain of yeast picked out or are you open to changing it based on style?

Depending on the AA% of the hops you use, the numbers you listed would give you either an overly bitter or an overwhelmingly bitter beer. I don't know if I've seen a recipe yet that uses 50% of the hops for bittering. If you multiplied that out to a 5 gallon batch, that would be 2.5 oz of bittering hops!

I think most people think of the APA/IPA vein when talking SMaSH. Is that what you are after?
 
wasn't really thinking to emulate a style although IPA is probably going to be the nearest... but after some reflection I am thinking that typically one expects the IBU level to be numerically similar to the starting gravity (so if the starting gravity is say, 1.057 then you would expect the level of bitterness to be around 45-65 and so (to answer my own question... if the AA was say 12 % and the boil time was 60 minutes then the amount of bittering hops would be closer to 0.2 oz if the total volume at bottling was to be 1 gallon)... or am I totally wrong ???
 
You can't just use time and alpha acids to calculate IBU's. ImageUploadedByWine Making1428443140.561080.jpg

Also go check out BJCP guidelines for styles metrics.

You'd be much better off plugging in your ingredients to some brewing software to determine quantities.
 

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