Did Someone Say Beer Blogging?

Here it is!

Sometime ago over at Blogger Beer I blogged beer. Particularly it was about brewing beer. I focused on the grains, mashing, and from fermenting to bottling. I left out mention of hops. I now mention hops.

Hops are the ingredient that give beer its distinctive bitterness. Hops were added as a preservative and over time have come to be an expected ingredient of beer. What is a hop? It is the flower bud of a hops plant which are vines. Almost every brewery tour I have been on makes mention of the fact the hops plant is related to the plant we harvest to make rope from (no, not the nylon plant). ;-) There are many variety of hops plants all having slightly different flavor characteristics.

Some hops are considered bittering hops and other are classified as finishing hops. The bittering hops are usually introduced to the wort (say it "wert" and it is the proto-beer) early in the boil and is present until the boil is over. They provide the bulk of the bittering and preservative effects. Finish hops are typically added in the very last minutes before the boil is over and their purpose is to add finer qualities to the hop flavor.

Now as many of you know different beers have different degrees of hopping. Some are "hoppy beers" and some are not so hoppy. Some beers have lots of hops but little bitterness and some have little hops but lots of bitterness. It all depends on the recipe, the heavier a beer is the more hops it can take without acquiring a bitter taste and the lighter the beer the less hops it takes to make the beer bitter.

My favorite style of beer is the Indian Pale Ale (aka IPA). IPAs were designed to be shipped from the UK to India and therefore were brewed with two preservative characteristics in mind. High in alcohol content and high in hoppiness. Both act to preserve the beer on their long voyage to India. IPAs are available in most brewpubs (from time to time) and usually you can find some IPA in the microbrew section of most liquor stores.

Stouts and other dark beers are (typically) heavily hopped but due to the nature of the beer there is little bitterness noticeable. What about Guinness? The distinct flavor of Guinness is derived from a touch of sour. They mix in a bit of soured brew to achieve Guinness's distinctive flavor.

Also, be careful to distinguish between stale beer and strong hopping (it was a mistake I frequently made before I began homebrewing). Most true imports I have drank have the same distinctive (unpleasant) flavor and that is the flavor of stale beer. Not that I know what wet straw tastes like but this is how I have seen the flavor characterized as. Almost all imports I have drank have that flavor to one extent or another. One of the worst for it is Grolsch (some "imports" are actually contract brewed here in the States so not all "imports" will have this flavor). Most San Miquel beer (from the Philippines) I drink has it as well. That is NOT hops and that is just stale beer (a can of Old Style I had this weekend had the flavor, Old Stale was more like it).