This week I take a recent have a look at mash hopping and why it’d promote long run beer stability.
What’s Mash Hopping?
The concept of including hops on to the mash tun in beer brewing truly has an extended historical past. Many brewers experimented with mash hopping within the 1980’s and 1990’s in its place or complement to boil hops, with the concept that it’d promote a smoother end on the beer. Sadly, given our restricted information of mash chemistry again then, what was doubtless occurring is that the mash hop addition was decreasing the pH barely giving lots of the advantages of a trendy pH adjustment, now normally completed with acid, however at a better price as hops are costly.
Mash hopping additionally does add some bitterness, however the utilization at a typical mash temperature of 154F (68C) is equal to a whirlpool addition on the similar time and temperature, however with out the benefit of preserving hop oils, which might be boiled off later. This someplace within the 8-9% stage as in comparison with boiling the hops. So it’s roughly equal to a 1/tenth measurement boil addition of the identical time interval. Provided that we may use a boil addition 1/tenth the scale to attain the identical bitterness, mash hopping is just not a great way to get bitterness into your beer.
I’ve been a very long time critic of mash hopping as it’s an inefficient use of hops for bittering, and likewise not one of the fragrant hop oils survive the boiling course of so it provides principally no aromatics.
Mash Hopping For Beer Stability
In a latest podcast episode with Scott Janish, he makes the case {that a} mash hop addition will truly decrease the degrees of metals like iron remaining within the completed beer and subsequently scale back issues with long run stability within the beer. Scott says that the alpha and beta acids within the hops react with iron and different metals in the course of the mash and might scale back iron content material within the completed beer by as a lot as 30%. This was with a reasonably sturdy addition of hops equal to about 20 IBUs he says.
Iron and different metals are extremely reactive, notably with oxygen, and play a significant position in spoiling your beer after it’s packaged, so lowering metallic content material is essential for long run beer stability. Metals will usually oxidize simply so any residual oxygen within the beer will create the traditional stale cardboard end of oxidized beer. Scott additionally claims it reduces aldehydes which may additionally generate off flavors. I encourage you to take heed to the full episode right here for extra info.
Mash Hopping to Improve Thiols
The opposite attention-grabbing improvement the previous few years has been the usage of mash hops to free thiols in sure kinds like Hazy/New England IPAs. I’ve completed plenty of podcasts highlighting the position that thiols from hops play in creating fruity tropical flavors in an IPA together with this one with Stan Hieronymus, and this one with Chris Graham and Vito Delluchi. Nonetheless we’ve not coated the usage of mash hopping as a method.
This article from Yakima Valley Hops covers the approach in some element. Thiols are available two kinds, free and sure, however solely the free thiols make a big contribution to the flavour and aroma of the completed beers. The fundamental thought is that hopping in the course of the mash converts among the crystaline sure thiols within the hops right into a kind that may then be biotransformed by yeast throughout fermentation into free thiols. Whereas thiols make up a tiny portion of the hop cone, they’re perceptable within the elements per trillion scale and subsequently have a huge impact on the completed beer.
Yakima recommends selecting hops which can be excessive in thiol content material, similar to Citra, Cascade, Galaxy, Eclipse in addition to a lot of the Australian and New Zealand varieties. Additionally they advocate utilizing a thiol boosting yeast for greatest impact similar to Omega’s Cosmic Punch Ale (OLY-402) for optimum influence. These newer, thiol boosting yeasts are higher at finishing the biotransformation of sure thiols to create free thiols. Yakima has some further suggestions like bagging your pelllet hops within the mash, and I encourage you to learn their full article for extra particulars.
So does mash hopping make sense in your subsequent beer? If you’re planning a beer for long run storage or maybe creating a industrial beer which will sit on the shelf for a while, then mash hopping to scale back metals in your beer would possibly make sense. Equally in case you are creating an enormous tropical hazy IPA then combining mash hops with a thiol boosting yeast may also be a sensible choice.
I hope you loved this week’s article on mash hopping. Thanks for becoming a member of me on the BeerSmith Dwelling Brewing Weblog. If you wish to take the guesswork out of brewing, please strive my BeerSmith recipe software program from BeerSmith.com. Make certain to enroll in my e-newsletter or my podcast (additionally on itunes and youtube) for extra nice recommendations on homebrewing.
