When making homebrew, how long should i boil the hop pellets with the malt ??

Question

I enjoy cooking and i enjoy making & drinking homebrew,if someone out there can give me the correct answer i would really appreciate it thanks.

Answer 1

This all depends on what you want the jops to achieve in your recipe. If you want them to provide bitterness then the usual procedure is to boil them for at least an hour. If you want them to provide aroma and/or hoppy flavours then these hops would be added later in the boil. However, if you boil hops for 15 or 30 minutes you will extract some bitterness from them and you need to allow for this in your recipe formulation. I tend to keep things simple in my brewing so I boil my bittering hops for 60 minutes and then add my flavour/aroma hops at the very end of the boil, turn off the heat, strain out the hops and cool so my late hops only get ~5 minutes at near boiling temperature.
It is also possible to add hops in the fermenter or serving vessel (dry hopping) and another interesting experiment that you may want to try is mash hopping which is adding your flavour/aroma hops to the grain in your mash when (for some reason) even after the subsequent boil they don' contribute to bitterness.

Answer 2

depends on the style of beer. each hop has an alpha acid % that you need to use to calculate the ibus needed for that style. I do 90 minute boils like most commercial breweries. When I make ipa's I boil my bittering hops for the entire boil. add more hops at 15 minutes till the end of boil. Add more hops at 3 min till end of boil and more hops at 1min until end of boil. Then I dry hop for a month. MMMMMMM hops. Just keep in mind that the more malt to water ratio that you have you need to add more hops to achieve the bittering that you want.

Answer 3

The typical break down is 60 min. for bittering hops, 30 min. for flavor hops and 15 -0 min. for aroma hops. You will need to know something about the hops you are using and the alpha acid rating of each hop. Follow a recipe that provides an IBU expectation for each hop addition.

I assume you know how to calculate IBUs using the amount/weight of hops, alpha acid rating and time of boil. If you do not, then get a home-brewing book and learn how - your beer can only get better!

Cheers