Bulk Hops

I finally, finally, got around to buying a food saver mason jar attachment. With the attachment, I am now able to vacuum seal mason jars and store bulk hops.

After we made the Union Jack clone and saw how many hops are actually needed to make good beer, I knew I had to buy in bulk. Otherwise, I would spend a fortune in just hops alone. There are several places online to buy bulk hops from, but I chose to get this round from YakimaValleyHops.com. We don't make too many English or German beers, so I stuck with common American varieties. It was a little hard to choose which hops to get, but I decided on 8 varieties to start with. Most were at least 8 oz, with 2 of the varieties being 4 oz and 2 oz. Most were about $1.25/oz which is about half (if not more) of the cost of buying single ounces of hops at the homebrew stores. Since I want to really start focusing on pale ales and IPAs, I'll be able to use double the hops for roughly the same price as before.

In total, we now have:

16 oz Centennial
8 oz Cascade
8 oz Simcoe
8 oz Citra
8 oz Chinook
8 oz Columbus
4 oz Ahtanum
2 oz Apollo

The first planned brew with the new hops will be a Centennial SMaSH Pale Ale using Marris Otter. SMaSH stands for Single Hop and Single Malt meaning only using 1 hop for the entire beer and only using 1 malt. It's a good way to learn the flavors and aromas from not only the hop, but the malt choice as well. I'm really looking forward to the next few batches and hopefully I'll finally be able to turn out a solid IPA.

#Team Dietrich