Mark Dredge at Pencil and Spoon raises the question of using hop extracts and oils in the brewing process.
Part of me think it’s a bit strange to use extract but the other part doesn’t mind if it’s done to be able to give the best flavour or bitterness possible – extract seems to give a cleaner type of bitterness than flowers or pellets. It’s no different to adding chilli extract instead of chopping up fresh peppers – you just get a different type of flavour which you will struggle to match with fresh ingredients.
Go comment there, if only to say you are on board with the idea or that you think it totally sucks. An answer somewhere between is of course acceptable. I’m curious to see what people think.
I must resist adding a single word, because it would lead to 3,000 before I knew where the day went.
If I’m not mistaken (and I probably am) Ballantine used hop oil for a long time. That Ballantine was before my time, but I’ve heard it was better than the Ballantine of today. Maybe hop oil was the key.
Are not hop plugs a distinct thing or am I being overly fussy?
Aren’t hop plugs just compressed whole leaf hops?
Craig (and Alan): Yes.
Nothing wrong with Hop oil if you’re using it to improve the beer or helping to increase your yields rather than throwing in lbs and lbs of bittering hops. Still haven’t decided on the Beta aroma products yet.
Isn’t Urquell using hop oils too?
I have to admit that if I’ve never had a beer where I can pinpoint a bad or off flavor to the use of hop pellets or hop oil. I used to use hop pellets in home-brewing all the time and the beer didn’t seem to suffer.
Then I am pro-plug. All the difficult flavours in a friendly package.
The oils I’ve never had a problem with. Other than drinking too much hop extract beer and being able to smell it in your pee like asparagus. Seriously. That was a freaky day…
@Craig
You’re absolutely right…Ballantine used hop oil (they distilled their own, in house, at the brewery in Newark). Used in conjunction with dry hopping, it is what made Ballantine’s ales so distinctive (especially their IPA).
And it is clearly one of the things lacking in the present day contract brewed iteration of Ballantine (a product whose only similarity to the original is the label).
The most revered double IPA in the U.S., Pliny the Younger, uses hop extracts in addition to pellets. Otherwise, too much wort would be soaked up by the hops.
As with any ingredients it all comes down to the brewers and his/her use of them. I have had delicious beer brewed with oils and extracts. In these cases the brewer kept things in balance. I have also had beers where the brewer used extracts and oils to push the limits of bitterness and flavor and things just turned out wrong. Often they had a phenolic or plastic like flavor that was not enjoyable.
I have used hop shots (oil) a few time for bitterness with only positive results. We were making a DIPA and did not want tons of hops sucking up the wort.