I collected this year’s hop harvest two weeks ago, and today we finally brewed a beer with them. This is the first time I’m using homegrown hops, so am really looking forward to tasting the final beer! Technically, this wasn’t actually a fresh hop ale, since I dried the hop cones before using them – but I’ll call this a fresh hop ale anyways. Since I’m not sure about the alpha acid content of these hops, we decided to use them only as flame-out hops, and instead use some Herkules at the beginning of the boil. This way we will hopefully extract the maximum aroma out of them as well. The homegrown hops weren’t very aromatic, so I’m expecting mostly grassy flavors and less of the typical citrus and pine resin. But hopefully I’ll be positively surprised! The post-boil wort had a slight perfume-like tone, which might have been hop-derived. For the malt bill, we went with a very simple 90% Maris Otter and 10% Carapils to an OG of around 1.050. This should let the hops shine (if they do). For the yeast, we used a really fruity ale strain that I’ve developed at work (more about that in a future post). I’m hoping it will compliment the hops, and make for a refreshing and crisp fresh hop ale! We will see in a couple of weeks!

This was the first time we brewed at our ‘new’ basement brewery (we moved there 1.5 years ago – yes, we’ve been extremely slow with the renovation), and I’m happy to say that everything went really smoothly. We were done in 5 hours and 30 minutes, reached almost 70% brewhouse efficiency, and the ventilation system (a really powerful inline exhaust fan) worked amazingly well. Looking forward to brewing a bit more regularly from now on!

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