When we go to Yakima every year for hop selection and harvest, we’re specifically looking for the complex citrus and tropical fruit expressions of those specific varietals. When selecting hops for this style, I think Citra®, Mosaic®, and El Dorado® is a tough combination to beat (Juicy Bits is 1:1:1 of each). But extended cold conditioning times are a must for heavily dry hopped beers, otherwise hop burn becomes a real issue. per gallon/37 grams per L) and it’s a surprisingly balanced and drinkable beer despite the extreme dry hop rate. As for total hop loads, one of our most popular beers, Extra Extra Juicy Bits, is dry hopped at nearly 10 lbs./bbl (5 oz. When it comes to dry hopping, we’ve found leaving the hops in contact 8 or 9 days to be the sweet spot for most of our beers, but we’ve had great results with as few as 5 days. We are always trying to find the perfect balance between hop flavor, hop aroma, and hop bitterness, so diversifying the whirlpool schedule has worked well for us.

For homebrewers, simplifying it to a larger flameout addition or even utilizing a hop stand would likely produce similar results. We typically stagger our whirlpool additions over 20–30 minutes, just to bring out more complexity and unique expressions from the hops given the varying time and temperature of those additions. But beyond that, all of our other hop additions for NEIPAs take place in the whirlpool. We utilize a very small (5–8 IBUs) first wort hop addition in nearly every beer we brew, mostly to give us a softer baseline bitterness to build from and to help combat boil-overs in the kettle. But we’ve found that more than 15% of flaked wheat or flaked oats can lend a bit more sharp “starchiness” to the beer, and if the grist exceeds more than 20% high-protein grains, it can be difficult to maintain colloidal stability. We use a fair amount of flaked wheat and flaked oats in a lot of our IPAs, mainly for their contributions to the mouthfeel and body of the beer. Depending on your base ion profile, strictly using calcium chloride and calcium sulfate to achieve those targets can result in too high a concentration of calcium, which may affect yeast behavior, specifically flocculation, so consider magnesium sulfate as an alternative for your sulfate additions. For most of our New England-style IPAs our water profile targets are around 175–200 ppm chloride, 75–100 ppm sulfate, and less than 150 ppm calcium.

Beersmith 3 losing hops