Increasing bitterness

[phytotech]

Hi all,

New member and relative new brewer. I have been making lots of wine and some wine over the last year. The beers have been mainly using LME and DME. I thought they were turning out pretty good.

However, a friend of mine was making Festa Brew beer, basically a non-concentrated brewers wort...just add yeast, and it just tasted better...more like a craft beer. That being said I bought a few, experimented some with dry hopping and the flavours were really good. That being said I wanted to try and increase the bitterness a bit, especially in the Pale Ale.

Was thinking of doing a boil on 4 litres of the wort and hopping with some nugget and cascade in addition to dry hopping with cascade. Basically I was trying to duplicate one of my favorite beers the Garrision Hopyard pale from Nova Scotia, which is at 40 IBUs. The standard Festa Pale is at 25 IBUs, so I guess my questions are.

Is this a reasonable idea?
How much hops do I need?
Do I need to increase the SG?

Thanks

 

[Kealia]

The easiest answer is that you'll need to boil some hops in the wort for 60 minutes to get the bitterness that you want. The variable here is that I assume you have wort that is pre-hopped, meaning that it's already been boiled with hops for a certain level of bitterness, flavor and aroma. When you boil the hopped wort you are going to get a bit more bitterness from the compounds already in there + whatever you add from the hops.

As for how much...that depends on the AA% of the hops themselves, how much wort you boil in (the gravity affects the hop utilization, etc.).

I'm sure we can all help you out a bit, but let us know the size of the batch, the AA% of the hops (it should be on the packaging) and the target starting gravity of the beer.

 

[phytotech]

The batch is 23L of prehopped wort, which is supposed to produce a beer with 25 IBUs

the nugget hops is 11-14% AA, though not super fresh. The cascade is 5-7% AA and fresh

I was thinking of boiling 4 L of the wort for 30 or 60 min and adding
60/30 min 1/2 oz nugget
5 min 1/2 oz nugget and 1/2 oz cascade
0 min 1 oz cascade

then dry hop with 1 to 2 oz cascade,

I obviously also wanted to increase the hop aroma/taste in addition to the bitterness

so would this increase the bitterness from 25-40 or am I over/under doing it?

thanks

 

[phytotech]

Well I went ahead with this 4 weeks ago.

did a 30 min boil on 4l of the wort added 1L of water ,with the following hop additions

15g Nugget (13%aa) 30 min
15g Nugget (13%) 5 min
15g cascade (6%) 5 min
15g cascade (6%) flame out

Pitched with Nottingham

Primary fermentor for 10 days, racked to carboy and dry hopped with 30 g cascade for 18 days

I bottled it last night and the beer tasted exceptional, was a bit worried since I couldn't cool it very fast and probably sat warm for about 20 min, it also seemed to stop fermenting and had to strap a brew belt on for the last week.


I also boiled another batch last night using less nugget and more cascade late, this is working out well