Adding Bitter Hops to Home Brewed Beer

Adding Bitter Hops to Home Brewed Beer
Alright and here we are with a very, very nice boil. You can see it’s really nice and vigorous. You want a good quality boil like that. Vigorous boil will do lots of good things for your beer. We have steeped the grains. We have added the malt extracts syrup, and now it’s time to add the hops, and it’s going to start smelling wonderful here momentarily. We’re going to add the hops. We’ve done the grains; we’ve done the extract syrup, now, we’re going to start with our hop additions. The longer you boil a hop the more it brings out the bitter in quality. The less you boil a hop, it brings up more the floral aromatic quality. We’re going to add some of the same hops in different times, utilizing different components out of it based upon how long we boil it. This will be called my bittering hop addition. With hops, you just open and pour them right in. This is optimum that we opened a little bit earlier to show you the pellet hops. Our hops are in one-ounce packages, so we’re going to go ahead and just take this, smells great, and throw them. Now, if you’ll notice this is surely the moment that your wort wants to jump out of the kettle. Lets just see what she wants to do today. It’s being nice and controlled. A lot of times at that this point, it’s going to want to foam way up. Have my spoon ready if I need it. We can see it is starting to get a little bit foaming. You just got to monitor at this point. Here we go, it’s starting to come up here. This is classic right here. You see how it’s beginning to come up. This is when you want to just gently… I find two things, gently stir down, and you can reduce the heat just momentarily. That will generally get it to cap back that down also. See those hops just instantly utilized into the wort, and now they’re going to kind of calm back down. Actually, just lay back down into the ward and begin to boil here in a sec, or not. You can see why to monitor at this point. Another thing I want to do is mark the time at this point. I’ve got my time marked, because I’m going to boil these for 60 minutes. It’s going to be the longest boil. This is called a bitter and hop addition. This is going to give a nice background bitter quality that plays off the sweetness in beer. I’m just kind of rinsing the hops off the side without trying to splash it too much. The ones that we will add a little bit later on are going to give more flow aromatic qualities.