Intense campfire at Jester King Brewery during their volunteer Friendsgiving

Homebrewers face many problems in the quest to making great beer consistently. There are many more than 99 of these problems. A reoccurring problem that I face is an over-abundance of hops; mostly because of my lupulust. I really enjoying buying ingredients in homebrew-scale bulk. I also cringe when buying some of these ingredients at the local home brew store (LHBS) simply because the markup over the bulk purchase is sometimes quite astounding. I’m not here to criticize the business model; rather I work around it with bulk purchases. However, this can present a separate problem.

I recently updated my inventory of hops and was a bit shocked to tally up the total. Roughly 18 pounds of frozen hops, from crop years 2010 through 2013. So far, i’ve not encountered any freshness issues due to the quality packaging from today’s homebrew supply vendors. Certainly there will be Alpha Acid degradation, but that’s less of a concern for homebrewers who aren’t attempting to rebrew the exact same beer from batch to batch.

To address this “problem”, I’ve been reorganizing my brew schedule and recipes. I’m currently pushing all of my hop-heavy recipes (IPAs yay!) up sooner. And I’ve also adjusted some existing recipes to be hopbursted instead so I can make use additional hops.

It was in this climate that this recipe was born. Fancy new hop?, check (Mosaic). Highly-prized and hard-to-find hop, check (Nelson). Name-brand hop, check (Simcoe®). Hop-bursting?, check. Using 3/4# of hops in a 6 gallon batch?, check.

Enjoy ārdeō.