My hoppy beers are good, but I know they could be better.

I’m pretty sure oxygen exposure is one of the last things making my homebrew IPAs not quite as good as my favorite commercial examples.

To try to improve this, I finally splurged and built a hop dropper from 2” tri-clamp fittings.

For its first test I’m going to brew a hoppy west coast pale ale.

Michael Tonsmeire’s Saison ‘Merican has been on my “recipes to try” list for a while. The combination of saison yeast, moderate funkiness, and IPA-like hopping sounds enticing.

I’ll be following the recipe/process pretty much as written for my first attempt at this beer.

Low-ish alcohol and big-ish flavor are the order of the day. I’m aiming for a sessionable ~5.3% hazy pale ale with lots of hop character.

The hop blend will be an old favorite of mine: amarillo, citra, and simcoe. But for something a little different, I’m going to use all cryo hops.

Eight years ago, Adrienne and I planted hop rhizomes in the corner of her parents garden: cascade, and nugget I think. Since then they’ve been neglected, growing kind of wild. We never trellised or harvested them. I thought they might not survive like this, but they seem to be hardy plants!

This year, a deer fence went up around the garden. The hops climbed all over it and produced an unexpected bounty. With so many hops just sitting there, I decided I’d finally try making a beer with them.

Many of my brewing ideas come from trying a great commercial beer and wanting to replicate its flavors at home. Today’s subject is Sapwood’s The Dragon which used a hop blend that I had never tried before: Mosaic, Nelson Sauvin, and Hallertau Blanc.

Both Nelson Sauvin and Hallertau Blanc are typically described as having wine-like qualities. Nelson Sauvin in particular has a reputation for being very unique, and a bit polarizing. I thought The Dragon was delicious though, so I guess I might be a fan.

This won’t be a clone, just a recipe inspired by the hop blend from the original.

In some unlucky timing, both DIPA variants and the last kolsch all kicked within a couple days of each other this week. An empty kegerator is a sad thing. This is going to be a quick “what do I have on hand?” recipe. Happily, what I have on hand is a buch of citra.

After having NEIPA and DIPA on my hoppy taps for the last few months, I’m in the mood for something easier drinking.

I’m aiming for a nice light pale ale in the low 4% abv, moderate bitterness, and solid hop flavor.

This is batch number two of my IPA experiment series. In the first batch I tested out some new equipment and techniques. The beers were some of the best IPAs I’ve ever made, but they were very hard to tell apart. It felt like I had one beer taking up two taps.

Maybe a bad sign for my motivation for testing small tweaks, but for this round I feel like having a litte fun and brewing two significantly different IPAs just to compare the hop blends.

I have ideas of what hops I like, but it’ll be nice to have two equally fresh beers to taste at the same time.

One of my brewing goals for 2020 is to improve the quality of my IPAs. I feel like this far into the brewing game, I should have a little more to show for it when I make my favorite style. They’re rarely bad, but they don’t wow as often as I’d like.

To that end I’m going to be doing a series of experiments this year where make two similar beers at the same time, with just one variable changed. I hope this will improve my process, one tweak at at time.

For this brew, I’m trying out some new hardware and techniques that I’ll use for the rest of my upcoming experiments.