Jbug wrote:Yeah buddy I brewed my first IPA the other day and dry hopped with cascade (first dry hop recipe too) and man is it amazing how much nose you get out of a beer... I kegged that one. It is such a great beer... I had my nose buried in my glass the whole time...
What happens if you use say, three for four hop varieties? Do the different flavors get lost in one another? I really would like to try to brew something with complex hop additions... Just to compare it with something I've done before
Josh
yes and no. depending on when and how many hop varieties you use you can muddle the flavor, will it make it a bad beer? no way, it might just end up un focused. Vinnie Cilurzo of RR is a master when it comes to hops, check out the recipe for Pliny and then try some, each hop variety is carefully chosen to coalesce into a very focused hop flavor profile.
When you first start brewing beer or brewing hoppy beer's it's hard not to just throw a ton of things in your beer and then change recipes every time, that said I can't stress enough how much I would recommend making single hop beers with the same recipe, or atleast making single hop beers. It really drives home the flavor of each hop and allows you to see how you can mix them in future recipes.
For instance, to me Northern Brewer has an earthy/ minty/menthol character to it, Chinook has a very in your face piney character that gets sap resiny to me in large amounts. Having brewed single hop beers out of both of these I've gotten a better grasp of how they work than if I had just read the descriptions. I find these 2 hops mixed in certain quantities can almost lend a candy cane like hoppiness to beers.
Once you learn the flavors you can go nuts, mango, papaya, white grape, grape fruit, tangerine, those are just a few.
you have alot of experimentation ahead