Brew day went smoothly.  We didn’t get quite the gravity we hoped for, but it was pretty close (1.067 instead of 1.070).  Thanks to some new hardware and the judicious application of thread seal tape, we got almost no leakage from the wort chiller this time around.  We had a little more than 5 gal., so we put 1 gal. in a growler like we often do.

Primary fermentation started quickly and got down to target gravity in about three days.  We just pulled them to secondary today, and added 1/4 oz. of leftover Nugget hops to the 1 gal side batch.  This is the first time we’ve dry-hopped, so we’re really looking forward to how much of an impact it will have.

I did some reading about dry-hopping, and in typical fashion there seems to be a pretty wide range of contradictory opinions.  The traditional view seems to be that you should dry-hop in secondary with low-alpha hops, and not leave them in more than a few days to avoid grassy off-flavors.  But other people seem happy to add hops in primary or directly to their kegs, and point out that many well-regarded IPAs are hopped with high-alpha hops like Simcoe.

Jai Alai, the beer that inspired us to make this batch, is dry-hopped with Simcoe, for example.  We didn’t like that very much, and the hops we liked the best were Nugget.  There is at least one well-liked IPA that’s dry-hopped with Nugget (Troegs Nugget Nectar).  So we decided to give that a try.

One of our favorite local IPAs has been in short supply recently (Cigar City’s Jai Alai). This had been my go-to beer ever since it started showing up at our local grocery store in cans (and the fact that it tasted even fresher in cans is a big part of my conversion to can/bottle agnosticism).

So of course we decided it was time to complete our transformation to IPA-lovers and brew our own.  We have really grown to like hoppier beers, especially given the almost total lack of hoppy beers in the Netherlands.  And the ones we most like are Florida Pale Ale-style IPAs like Jai Alai and SwampHead’s Big Nose.  These are generally as hoppy as more traditional American IPAs, but with less resiny bitterness and more floral and herbal aroma.  I found a forum post with the Jai Alai hop schedule.  And since there were five different hops involved, I decided to order a bunch of American hops — Cascade, Centennial, Chinook, Mt. Hood, Nugget, Willamette, etc. and taste-test them to decide what we really wanted to use.  Our usual supplier was sold-out of Amarillo, so we wound up with nine 1-ounce packages of American hops.

We made two batches of tea — one pellet of each hop in tiny espresso cups.  The first batch were the low-alpha varieties (Ahtanum, Cascade, Centennial, Mt. Hood and Willamette).  There were some clear losers (Cascade tasted very acrid and resiny, Ahtanum tested very oily), but no clear winners.

The second round had much clearer winners and losers — the high-alpha varieties (Chinook, Columbus, Nugget and Simcoe) had much more pronounced flavors.  We both liked Chinook and Nugget quite a bit, and hated Columbus (engine-fire) and Simcoe (astringent and resiny).

After a quick check of the handy Oxford Companion to Beer told us that Mt. Hood and Nugget were typically used for bittering, we arrived at a hop schedule: Mt. Hood and Nugget for bittering, and Centennial, Chinook and Willamette divided evenly between flavor and aroma.  Going back to the Jai Alai hop schedule showed that we’d basically picked all the hops they weren’t using, and gave us a little pause.  But we decided to plow ahead with what we liked, since we can always go back and copy Jai Alai if it doesn’t turn out.