We’re witnessing something in the beer world as rare as the birth of a new indigenous language: the emergence of a new national brewing tradition. Like languages, brewing traditions mostly die off. They didn’t used to be fused with entire countries but more often with regions or even single towns. In the nineteenth century dozens of indigenous brewing traditions could fairly be said to exist, but they were done in by the modern world — communications, industrialization, nationalization. In the twentieth century dozens died, and no new traditions took their place. In fact, the last one to emerge was the faceless, pan-national lager-brewing tradition that caused the death of so many of the others. The idea that a new tradition might develop organically would have seemed implausible — perhaps unthinkable — four decades ago.
What is national tradition? It’s a cultural institution, invisible, yet strangely powerful. Like other cultural institutions, it is created and perpetuated by interaction and familiarity. If you cross the border between Bavaria and Bohemia on a train, the landscape doesn’t change; the climate and soil doesn’t change. And yet the food in a Czech restaurant does not resemble German food.
When I first started reading about beer, I was amused by descriptions of how Belgians, admiring stouts and Scottish ales, decided to brew them at home — and promptly made Belgian ales that only vaguely gestured in the direction of the original styles. Brewing, for a Belgian, means strong, dry beers that go through secondary fermentation in a bottle. It’s just how you brew — you wouldn’t dream of not making beer that way. All the great brewing countries have a distinctive approach that does not resemble the approach of even neighboring countries. Like cuisines, brewing traditions tend to stay within national borders.
Lo and behold, Americans have one, too. When Americans started brewing nonindustrial lagers 30-odd years ago, they imitated the beer styles brewed in Europe; many of which still serve as a decent counterfeit for the originals. But where the real change has happened is in America’s embrace of hops and the subsequent ways we’ve adapted our brewing to cater to them. We think about hops differently from the way any other country ever has, we use them differently, and, in the true test of national tradition, our techniques are now influencing breweries elsewhere.
Although there’s some dispute on exactly when all of this started, I credit Ken Grossman and Sierra Nevada with striking the note that has reverberated ever since. He laid the basic template in 1979 when he created the brewery’s Pale Ale, a beer that bore all the hallmarks of the American style: an ale designed so that all the other elements of the beer served to highlight the fresh, electric flavors of American hops. It borrowed a bit from the English tradition but deviated in key ways. At 5.6%, it was quite a bit stronger than English ales; it was a bit hoppier than English ales and, because it used local hops, tasted quite a bit different; finally, Grossman used a neutral yeast that didn’t contribute any fruitiness, leaving the caramel malts and Cascade hops to do all the talking.
Even more important, Sierra was miles ahead of the rest of the country in 1981 when they released their seasonal Celebration, the first modern American IPA. It’s amazing to me that this beer doesn’t get more attention for how much it anticipated what would ultimately become popular more than 20 years later. Even 35 years later it is remarkably current: a robust 6.8% beer with 65 bitterness units (unimaginable in 1981) and iridescent with those spiky, citrusy, piney flavors that are now the hallmark of American brewing.
Americans trudged through the 1980s and most of the 1990s essentially looking to Europe for inspiration. It wasn’t until near the end of the 1990s that hoppy ales became popular and the rest of the country caught up with Sierra. The first wave of hoppy beers leaned heavily on bitterness, and there was an unfortunate race to see who could pack the most IBUs into a beer. By the mid-2000s, breweries were starting to discover the pleasures of hops added later in the boil and conditioning tank, which both added tons of flavors and helped balance the high levels of bitterness.
Over the next decade the evolution continued, and bitterness slowly gave way as late-addition and dry hops came to characterize American beer. It has become such a prominent feature of American brewing that “hop bursting,” a practice homebrewers popularized in which no bittering hops are used, is now a regular commercial practice. In the mid-2000s America’s hoppy ales started impressing foreign brewers, and now “American-style” beers are made by small craft breweries all over the world.
This is something new in the world. In my survey of the historic sources, no country has ever focused so intently on late– and post–kettle hopping. Ever since hops were incorporated into brewing, there have been bitter beers. But because hops came along as a way of managing spoilage, that bitter charge has always been primary. British breweries have been dry-hopping for decades, but building beers around the intense flavors and aromas of hops is a style for which I have found no precedent.
Now Americans have been doing it long enough, and have gotten so adept at it, that it’s hard for them not to think about goosing a beer by adding late-addition hops. I’m about as orthodox a homebrewer as you’ll find, but I have been infected by this habit myself. A saison? Well, I think, it would certainly be great to have some nice citrusy accents to the beer. A German lager? Isn’t it really in the spirit of these beers to add a bit of delicate aromatics by dry-hopping? A Belgian dubbel? Hmm, perhaps just a hint of pepper from a nice whirlpool infusion. This is the culture at play, the national tradition, and I am no more able to resist it than the Belgian who puts his Scottish ale through the warm room.
Of course, it’s not entirely about hops. There are a few other key hallmarks of American brewing, so let’s run through the main points.
Two-row plus specialty malts. The four major European brewing countries lean very heavily on base malts to build the flavor profile of their beer. Americans have a recipe-based approach that starts with neutral two-row malt as “sugar” (the fermentables) and uses specialty malts for flavor and color. This is unusual, and no other country does it.
Crystal malt. Although use of crystal is tapering off, it has long been a key flavor marker for American ales (another legacy of Ken Grossman). Other countries use caramel malts in small proportions, but Americans use them to contribute both body and a distinct caramel flavor to their beer. The body helps buffer bitterness, and the caramel harmonizes nicely with the flavors in American hops. However, as Americans rely more and more on late-addition hops, crystal malts are being de-emphasized — but not eliminated.
Neutral yeasts. The most popular strain of ale yeast in the United States, by far, is the Chico strain (Wyeast 1056, White Labs WLP001, Safale Fermentis US-05), which ferments well and gets out of the way so the hops can shine. Guess which brewery “Chico” refers to? (Sierra Nevada.)
Strength and intensity. American beers have traditionally been stronger and more intense (whether they’re hoppy, tart, or malty) than beers elsewhere. This was partly because brewers and drinkers were unsophisticated; as the market matures, flavors are coming more into balance. It is nevertheless likely that, relative to other countries, Americans will always favor strength and intensity.
American hops and late-addition hops. As already discussed, these are by far the clearest marker of place. There is a worldwide move toward hop breeding, and breweries are moving in the direction of individualizing their beers with specific combinations of hops. This trend is aided by the focus on late-addition and dry hops, where the flavors and aromas of these new varieties are most expressive.
America is not at the terminal point of its evolution, but it is past the midway point. Drinkers and brewers are in agreement about the basic contours, and we’ll just have to wait and see where the ride takes us. Wherever the American tradition ultimately settles, it will revolve around lively hop flavors — and a style of brewing new to the world.
Pity the poor IPA, a beer type invented in another country and another time. Now the name is being put into service to describe an almost comical range of beers: double and triple IPAs; session IPA; Brett IPA; red, white, and black IPAs; Belgian IPA; fruit IPA; tart IPA; even India pale lagers. As absurd as these names are (black India pale ale and India pale lager being especially Dadaesque), they point to a very real phenomenon. An entire national tradition has developed in the United States around the use of electric American hops, and the best we’ve been able to do so far in naming it is attaching “India” or “IPA” to the title. Linguistically it’s absurd, but stylistically it has a clear logic.
Moreover, this national tradition is still evolving. Hoppy American ales began transcending niche status 20 years ago, but those beers were very different from the ones we know today. The ’90s hoppy ales were brewed to gale-force bitterness. Breweries built these beers around citrusy American hops (the classic C-hops, which should now be granted some kind of hall-of-fame status along with Goldings, Hallertauer, and Saaz) and substantial crystal malt additions. That model is now seriously on the wane, replaced by a philosophy that prizes hop aroma and flavors far more than bitterness. If you’re reading this book, you probably already know about these trends.
What you may not know is how radically this is changing the way breweries make these beers. Hops have always been used in the brewhouse primarily for their bitterness; this not only balanced malt sweetness, but it had the additional virtue of protecting the beer against infection. What we know about hop utilization is based on the way they have always been used — at the start of boil, with minor additions later on that add “incidental” bitterness.
Breweries are now flipping that, adding scant amounts at the beginning of the boil and getting most of the flavor, aroma, and, yes, bitterness, from late or postboil additions. In a modern hoppy ale of 50 IBUs, perhaps only 10 percent of the bitterness comes from the first addition. The rest of the bitterness comes from those later additions, which add further layers of flavor and aroma to the beer — flavors and aromas that have never appeared in beer before.
Breakside started life as a little brewpub in the outlying neighborhood of Woodlawn back in 2010. Both the neighborhood and the brewery have changed a lot since then. The original brewery contained a tiny three-barrel kit and was entirely hands-on. Brewer Ben Edmunds’s beers, at turns experimental and traditional, soon became popular enough to demand a production facility, which opened in 2012.
In Portland Edmunds is known as an alchemist. At any given time Breakside will have a number of experimental beers with everything from lychee to fennel pollen to spruce tips alongside classic pilsners, kölsches, and stouts. What has lately drawn the most attention, however, is Breakside’s raft of hoppy ales, starting with the flagship IPA, which in 2014 scored a gold at the Great American Beer Festival. Edmunds and his team of brewers started stacking in other hoppy ales like cord wood: Wanderlust IPA, Lunch Break India Session Ale, India Golden Ale, La Tormenta (a dry-hopped sour), as well as a host of seasonal and one-off hoppy ales. (In a typical year Breakside makes 85 different brands of beer.)
Portland was on the vanguard of modern hoppy American ales as the profile migrated from bitterness to flavor, and Breakside remains on the cutting edge. Their La Tormenta, released in 2013, revealed how lactic sourness could complement tropical hop flavors. Breakside’s emphasis on whirlpool and dry hopping has also given them a leg up on making sessionable hoppy beers, which are becoming one of their signature types. Breakside has gone from being an obscure, remote brewery to setting the pace for the trends in American brewing.
Edmunds’s interest in brewing developed when he was living in Colorado, where there was great outdoor fun during the daytime but less to do at night. He started homebrewing and was surprised by how much it “clicked” (his word). Pretty soon he was enrolled at the Siebel brewing school and studying in Chicago and Munich. With his second degree in hand, he headed to Portland, found a job as assistant brewer at Upright, and before long ran into the folks planning to open Breakside. They hired him as their first brewer, and he has overseen every batch brewed since.
There’s no reason to spend a lot of time discussing these beers — they are the clear favorite among American homebrewers, who know them well. The one thing I would emphasize again is the now-mandatory importance of very rich, vivid hop flavors and aromas. These define the style. Bitterness is no longer a necessary element in these beers (as such products as Deschutes’ Fresh Squeezed IPA show), but lush hop flavors and aromas are.
When I spoke to Edmunds, he made an interesting additional point, and I think it’s relevant when we consider national tradition. Ingredients matter. You could make a perfectly executed Czech pilsner, but if you used Mosaic hops, it wouldn’t be appropriate for style (however tasty it might be). In a similar vein Edmunds believes American hoppy ales have become so well established that they need a marker of place as well. In his mind that means the classic American C-hops, plus Amarillo and Simcoe. “If you’re not using one of those, you might have an awesome hoppy beer, but it will lack an element of familiarity.” This is one brewer’s rule — one that other American brewers routinely violate — but it is part and parcel of a developing tradition in which rules are increasingly observed.
If you want to make a hoppy American ale, it behooves you to use some classic hop to anchor the flavor in familiarity.
— Ben Edmunds, Breakside
When he’s brewing a hoppy ale, whether an American amber or red ale, a pale ale, or any variant of IPA from session through triple IPA, Ben Edmunds approaches it the same way. He actually had to describe the thinking to me a couple of times before I grasped what he was saying; it is both simple and radical. “To make a successful hoppy ale, the bottom line is you have to start with a very clear flavor profile of your hops in mind and work backward. Everything stems from the hops.”
For Edmunds this means starting with a standard hop schedule — one he uses for every hoppy ale — and sticking with it. Breakside follows this blueprint: the first addition at 60 minutes (start of boil), then at 10 minutes, and finally at whirlpool. Edmunds doesn’t think it matters too much whether the late addition comes at 20, 5, or 1 minute from the end of boil — but he does think it makes sense to stick with one formula. And here’s the part that seemed so radical to me: he builds his IBUs starting with the whirlpool addition and works backward from there. And he always uses the same amount of hops in the whirlpool, no matter what their alpha acids.
At Breakside that means 1.5 pounds per barrel, which would be 4 ounces per 5 gallons. He typically uses a “soft” hop such as Citra, Galaxy, Mosaic, Amarillo, or El Dorado in the whirlpool, and they steep for roughly an hour. During that time the temperature drops from boiling to about 180°F (82°C) and, contrary to what some people think, contributes substantial bitterness. Most bitterness calculators assume very low utilization, but at Breakside they get about 12 percent, or half what you’d expect if the same hops had been added at 60 minutes.
Once he calculates the bitterness on the whirlpool addition, Edmunds moves to the 10-minute addition. Again, he uses a consistent amount — roughly 1 pound per barrel (2.667 ounces per 5 gallons), though he may adjust slightly up or down if the alphas look out of whack. For the 10-minute addition, he likes “punchy” hops — varieties with a little zing — such as Cascade and Centennial.
Only at this point, once he’s added up the bitterness contribution from the 10-minute and whirlpool additions, does he round off the bitterness he needs with a 60-minute bitter charge, and it’s always small, contributing between 5 and 10 IBUs. He’s often not even looking for bitterness from this charge — just good kettle performance (causing trub to form and preventing boilover). The bitter charge can be really tiny. “I made an IPA today on the three-barrel system where the 60-minute addition was 1.1 ounces,” he told me, laughing.
This is, he says, the way most brewers now think about their hoppy ales. “In all formats, the old model of the hop schedule is almost entirely outmoded,” Edmunds says, referring to old hop schedules where the bulk of the hops go in at 60 and 30 minutes. “Frankly, it’s not a secret, but all the brewers who make these award-winning beers — everyone does it. Those 60-minute hops are basically for kettle performance.”
To emphasize the lesson of this approach: Edmunds builds his bitterness backward, starting with the whirlpool. This is an extraordinary development in brewing. Many brewers over the centuries have made beers that emphasized hops. But it is an American innovation to use these giant loads of hops late in the boil to create not only bitterness but intense flavors and aromas. Nowhere in the historical record have I found this approach.
Edmunds approaches the grist with a similar mind-set, building a recipe that uses some body-building malts, crystal malt, and dextrose in addition to base malts. Stronger beers will use more dextrose to boost alcohol and attenuation, while lower-alcohol and darker beers will use more color malts and crystal malts. Edmunds uses crystal malts for “back-end sweetness,” not the heavy caramel and dark-fruit flavors and recommends always using crystal of 40 lovibond or lower in hoppy ales — except in the case of hoppy red ales, when he does use 60L crystal and a small amount of other dark crystal malts.
Yeast selection is not a critical element — Americans overwhelmingly favor neutral, clean yeasts — but even here there are considerations. The central issue is not ester production, but flocculation, which affects dry hopping. In Edmunds’s experience the presence of yeast changes the expression of hop aromas. “With higher-flocking strains, we find that you’ll get stronger dank, oily, and juicy notes than in the presence of more yeast. Midflocking strains (such as White Labs WLP001 or Wyeast 1056) are what most of the brewers who pioneered American hoppy ales use, so the most classic dry hop aromas were created using these strains. If it’s familiarity that you want — lots of citrus, tropical, floral, and fruity notes — use a medium flocculator.” Finally, lots of yeast in suspension “dulls the pungency of hop aromatics.”
Again, no one has researched these effects. “The theories range from the idea that there is a biotransformation of hop oils in the presence of yeast to the idea that there is some biophysical mechanism by which yeast pulls hop oil out of beer,” Edmunds said.
We don’t know a lot about bitterness. We know that an IBU is a chemical measurement of a given amount of iso-alpha acids dissolved in beer. We have some sense of the way isomerization happens during a boil, and how this affects the measurement. (Hop’s alpha acids must be isomerized — their molecular structure rearranged — to go into solution and add bitterness to a beer.) What we don’t know is how the use of hops affects the perception of bitterness. Several studies, for example, have demonstrated that using first-wort hoping (adding hops to the kettle during lautering) creates a “smoother” bitterness. What does that mean? We don’t know — it’s a subjective, albeit measurable, judgment.
The sense of bitterness is confounded by the additional perception of hop flavors (aromas and tastes), which track as “hoppy” to the palate. Until a decade ago, breweries had never brewed in the way Edmunds describes here, and scientists hadn’t studied what happens chemically when you add immense amounts of hops postboil. If the subjective sense of bitterness can be altered merely by using first-wort hopping, surely there’s a big difference in late-wort and post–kettle hopping. Even well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, we still don't have the science to help describe these effects.
Ben Edmunds
Breakside Brewery
Ferment cool (65 to 70°F [18–21°C]) with a low-ester American ale strain such as Wyeast 1056 or White Labs WLP001. Twenty-four hours after primary fermentation is complete, rack to secondary and begin dry-hopping with 4 ounces of a blend of Citra and Comet hops. Let stand for 3 days. If possible, rouse the hops each day to keep them in contact with the beer; if it’s not possible, Edmunds suggests adding a second and even third dry hop of the same volume each day. Rack, and chill for a week.
Bottle or keg. Because perishable hop flavors and aromas are central to these beers, they don’t last long. “Do everything in your power to keep oxygen out of the beer.” Edmunds recommends evacuati ng kegs with CO2 and notes that bottle conditioning will extend the life of your beer somewhat.
Notes: Edmunds recommends treating your water with at least 100 ppm calcium and a 5:1 or greater sulfate-to-chloride ratio. You may also use a bit of acidulated malt to lower pH (no more than 3 percent). Dry-hopping amounts will vary depending on gravity. For low- to mid-gravity beers, use 3 to 4 ounces. With higher-gravity IPAs, bump it up to 5 ounces. For high-gravity double and triple IPAs, you can use up to 10 ounces of dry hops (!). Note that the IBU figures here are extremely provisional.
When Edmunds began tweaking his recipes a few years back, he did it entirely by taste, which is how he ended up using so few hops at 60 minutes. Start with this recipe, and then, like Edmunds, begin tinkering — and ignore the IBU values. Think carefully about bitterness and IBUs, and disregard the calculators that tell you there are no IBUs in the late-addition and whirlpool hop additions.
My discussions with Ben Edmunds have led me to conclude that we’re in need of a serious rethinking of hops. The way Americans use hops has changed the way we think about them. For the last thousand years, hops’ principle purpose has been bittering, which was often a proxy for microbial protection. As a result, every beer style on earth had used the bulk of the hops early in the boil. Everything we know about hops and bitterness stems from this approach.
To the extent researchers have looked at hops (and they haven’t done much), they’ve looked at the bittering end of things. But because Americans are now using the vast percentages of their hops late or after the boil, the effects are even more mysterious. We know something about alpha acids and isomerization, and we know a little about the four main oils in hops — beyond that, it’s all guesswork. Since brewers are using these hops in real time, they need to understand how the different varieties affect their beer. We don’t even yet have the language for different categories, so breweries are making it up as they go along.
As we talked about hop varieties and their use at different points in the brewing process, Edmunds kept calling some of them “punchy” and others “soft.” He struggled a bit to explain what he meant, but the terms themselves do much of the heavy lifting. Hop varieties behave differently from each other, a phenomenon brewers have intuited for decades. Some hops seem more aggressive, while others are gentle. It’s not really a matter of intensity — Amarillo is as flavorful as Cascade — but the “feeling” that accompanies the flavors differs.
For Breakside this means a lot of American hops can be clumped into these two groups: soft hops (Citra, Galaxy, Mosaic, El Dorado, Amarillo) and punchy ones (Cluster, Cascade, Centennial, Columbus, Chinook, Simcoe, Comet). A few don’t fit into either category: Edmunds offers Nelson Sauvin and Equinox as two that have elements of both. These categories may — probably will — evolve. Breakside may eventually discard them. But they illustrate how brewers think about hop varieties as they use them in the brewery.
Hops researcher and professor Tom Shellhammer has been looking into some of these questions at Oregon State University. In an earlier study he and his team looked into whether cohumulone levels affect a hop’s bittering “harshness” or not. For decades it was assumed that higher cohumulone levels made a hop unpleasant, and this belief led breeders to choose emergent strains with low amounts. But nobody had ever tested it. Shellhammer did. The results? The differences were subtle, but when the researchers “did pick up a difference and could describe it, the high iso-cohumulone hop had more desirable attributes. It was less harsh and medicinal, [and had] finer, more fleeting bitterness.”
He’s currently at work on a study looking into whether a hop’s oil content has any effect on dry hopping. It’s an effort to figure out what makes the technique effective. “If you’re going to use hops for dry hopping and make a consistent product batch to batch, should you as a brewer hop based upon the mass of hops, or the oil content of the hops — or based on something else?” His early results have so far found no correlation between oil content and a hop’s ability to give beer those rich, aromatic notes brewers prize. We are still in the dark ages of hop knowledge — and if there’s anything good about that state of affairs, it’s that things are only going to get more interesting as we go forward.
That leaves it up to the brewers to suss out the qualities of hops that make tasty beers, and Breakside has some additional advice:
Limit the number of hop varieties you use to five at the most, with three or four being ideal. Once you add too many different hop varieties in, the flavors become muddy, indistinct. This is obviously a preference, and many breweries use seven or eight varieties. I’ve found it to be good advice, especially as you’re learning which hops do what to your beer. Limit your variables.
On the other hand, use more than one. Some single-hop beers really work, but not many. Most varieties lack the complexity to give you a lush presentation of different flavors.
Don’t blend the hops on hot side additions but instead devote one hop to each addition. There are a couple of reasons for this. Again, blending makes it hard to isolate which flavors you like and may create those generic “hoppy” flavors. But Edmunds also believes hops work better or worse at different times. “Over time, we’ve learned which hops we like better as kettle hops, which ones we like better as whirlpool hops, which as dry hops. Comet, only a dry hop. Amarillo, El Dorado, Citra — great whirlpool hops. Centennial and Cascade we like better as a 10-minute hop.” It’s fine to add a blend of varieties during dry hopping, and Breakside typically uses two or three varieties to get complex aromas.
Plan to drink the beer quickly. This is perhaps more important to a commercial brewery, but every homebrewer should understand it, too. These kinds of hoppy American ales are the least stable beers a brewer can make. “You have 20 days of brewery freshness, and then it begins to degrade. If you bottle-condition, you might buy yourself a week. But by day 30 you’re dealing with a fundamentally different beer than you had at day 1. When you’re building these beers you should know what that beer will taste like at day 30.” What’s especially interesting is that hop varieties change at different rates, and some wear better than others. Using their Wanderlust IPA as an example, Edmunds says, “the first 15 days is all Mosaic.” It goes through an awkward adolescence; then “around day 30 the Amarillo starts to come forward, and it becomes this new beer. When you have that beer from days 30 to 45, it has a little bit of tropical dankness, but essentially all that Mosaic character is gone, and it becomes brighter [and expresses] citrus peel, marmalade.”
Scaling Up or Down. Every beer Edmunds makes, from his session IPA to triple IPAs, starts with this basic formulation: 70 to 85 percent base malt (typically US or Canadian two-row; possibly some UK malt blended in); 10 to 15 percent body-building malt (includes Munich, Vienna, flaked grains, aromatic/honey malt, dextrin malts); 0 to 10 percent dextrose; and 0 to 10 percent crystal malt (in rare cases he’s used up to 25 percent body-building malts). Crystal malt is good for balancing punchy hops and isn’t necessary when all you’re using are soft hops. The sugar is useful in bringing a clean finish and giving hops a platform for expression but should only be used in beers that are 14° P/1.057 or above.
Session IPAs and triple IPAs shouldn’t be mashed at the same temperature. Drop the mash to 150 to 152°F (66–67°C) for high-gravity beers, and use 10 percent dextrose unless you want a chewier beer. For session IPAs skip the sugar and raise your mash temperature to 155°F (68°C) or higher. When Harpoon Brewery made its session IPA, Take 5, brewer Steve Theoharides used pale and body-building malts and then pushed the mash temperature to the limit. “We really pushed the upper limit on our mash temperature. We’re pretty high — around 160, 161°F (71, 72°C).” It was a temperature he’d never reached before, and when it came time to brew on the 120-barrel system, he confesses, “My teeth were chattering a little bit.” You can’t argue with the results, though. “Now we get something that attenuates to 65 percent, which is remarkable, especially for such a low-ABV beer,” he says. (Harpoon Take 5 IPA, like Breakside’s IPA, relies on late-addition hops. In fact, there are no bittering hops at all in Take 5.)
From there you follow the hop schedule no matter what beer you’re making: start with 3 to 4 ounces in the whirlpool, another 2.5 to 3 ounces at 10 minutes, and just enough of a bitter charge to inhibit boilover. This part never changes, though for very light beers you have to be mindful of the alpha acid percentages in the hops you choose. “If you want to make a beer with really high alpha aroma varieties, great — but don’t try to make a session IPA that way,” Edmunds cautions. “Because either you’re not going to use enough hops (because you don’t want to get the IBUs too high) or you’ll get your IBUs too high from using too many high-alpha hops.”
Hoppy American ales have ranged well beyond just a continuum of strength and color — they are now made with spices (white IPAs), fruit, Belgian yeasts, and even Lactobacillus and Brettanomyces. These are built the same way but require a bit of extra care and handling.
Fruit IPAs. These are so expensive that professionals don’t make them very often — which make them great for homebrewers. Edmunds advises you to look at what the fruit adds beyond fermentables and flavor — sweetness, body, and astringency — and adjust your recipe accordingly. You will obviously want to use hops that harmonize with the flavors, and there are many fruity varieties that do so. A touch of acidity will give fruit structure and make the aroma and flavors pop, so consider adding just a bit of malic, tartaric, or lactic acid — like winemakers do.
Dry-hopped sours. This is a fairly recent entry to the canon, and an impressive one. Moderate your alcohol to 5 to 6.5 percent ABV, and keep your IBUs as low as you possibly can. Use kettle souring to produce a cleanly acidified wort that is only moderately tart (see chapter 10 for instructions). This is a hard style to make, and Edmunds says you should master kettle souring before you try it. Dry-hop with “soft” varieties such as Citra, Amarillo, El Dorado, and Galaxy — and don’t use spiky ones such as Simcoe. “Hop selection is key,” he says.
Brett IPA. There are a couple of ways to make this beer: pitching with Brettanomyces and serving fresh, or dry-hopping an aged Brett beer. If you’re pitching Brett, it will be bitterer than you’re used to over time. Build in body and malt sweetness with rye or crystal malt so the beer doesn’t bottom out as the yeast munches away. Brett-pitched beers end up drier, so tone down hop and water profile and build in body. If you’re dry-hopping an aged Brett beer, add hops to the conditioning tank just before packaging.
Belgian IPA. Edmunds points out that the first wave of these beers tended to focus on phenolic yeasts and hitched them to “dank” hops such as Simcoe and Amarillo. As breweries continued, they switched to yeast strains with lower phenolics and higher ester profiles and chose soft, tropical hops to accentuate the fruity yeast notes. Edmunds also recommends that you choose a yeast that has medium flocculation, because the yeast will change a beer during dry hopping. “Too little or too much yeast in suspension will really change the flavor,” he noted.
American hoppy ales are the most individual and customizable style brewed today. When Edmunds and I spoke about them, he pointed out that there are definitely other approaches — making chewy IPAs with high finishing gravities, mash hopping, and mid–kettle hopping. There are few ironclad orthodoxies, and if I’d chosen to speak with Vinnie Cilurzo at Russian River, the methods would look different.
Indeed, while one needs to take note of all these elements individually, it’s also important to consider them collectively. The success of a beer always rests in the harmony of the different elements. And here there are no hard rules. Lower levels of carbonation will provide softer hop aromas, but higher levels will give a greater perception of aroma. Increasing mash pH will decrease the utilization of hop acids, allowing more hop character without bitterness — but will lower brewhouse efficiency. Body affects the perception of bitterness, so a thicker or thinner body will affect the way you balance your hops. With each of these decision points, there is no right answer, but they will go a long way to determining the success of your beer.
One thing I take away from Edmunds is that, particularly because American IPAs are so customizable, it’s good to develop a blueprint yourself and work within it. It eliminates some of the randomness of dealing with so many ingredients and techniques and helps you hone your approach and find your own IPA “voice.”
Let us consider the fresh-hop beer. A seemingly simple beast, it is made from the addition of undried hops rushed sun-warm from field to kettle (or tank). These hops suffuse the beer with qualities unavailable to the brewer using dried hops: vivid, almost electrified, perfumy aromas and flavors as intense as ripe fresh-picked fruit or flowers. When they work, fresh-hop ales are among the most satisfying beers in the world. When they don’t, they can taste vegetal or even evoke overripe compost. Ten years ago, breweries didn’t fully understand how to use fresh hops, but they have learned a lot in a decade. It is one of the styles most available to the homebrewer — or at least the homebrewer with a backyard trellis — and can become a joyful event on the annual brewing calendar.
Double Mountain was founded in 2007 by two seasoned veterans from the brewing industry, Charlie Devereux and Matt Swihart — then the head brewer at nearby Full Sail in Hood River, Oregon. The brewery rests along the banks of the Columbia River, in sight of its namesakes Mounts Hood and Adams. But it’s also roughly equidistant from the hop fields in Yakima and the Willamette Valley, and this is the more important geographical fact.
Double Mountain has unusual facility with Humulus lupulus. Matt and his team of brewers hand-select their hops and know how to coax enormous flavor and aroma from them — and although they make a broad variety of different styles, it is the hoppy beers for which they’ve become famous. The brewery’s regular line consists of three IPAs and a hoppy kölsch. If you have a chance to visit the brewery, you might witness brewers sending one of these beers to a large hop back, filled halfway with whole hop cones. I saw a batch of Hop Lava IPA flow from the kettle, and — no kidding — the wort turned green in the device.
About the time Matt was founding Double Mountain, fresh-hop ales were becoming an annual mainstay among Washington and Oregon breweries. He was one of the first brewers to dial in the process for extracting the most potent flavors and aromas from a fresh hop — the secret is judicious use of conventional kilned hops — and he shares his process here.
Swihart got his professional start as an aerospace engineer. A love of homebrewing sent him on a path that led to the Siebel Institute and then to a series of breweries. He finally landed at Full Sail Brewing in 1994, ultimately becoming head brewer before leaving to start Double Mountain with Charlie Devereux. “When we started the brewery,” he told me, “we had only one thing at the top of our mind. The beer had to be about the beer. We wanted to make beer that we would drink and be delighted with when we walked into a pub. Simple.”
One of the most important considerations in a fresh-hop ale comes before you fire up your hot liquor: when to harvest hops. It’s important to make sure you leave them on the bine long enough to produce the essential oils that will make your beer pop. Hop researcher and Oregon State University professor Tom Shellhammer, who is currently doing research on the effect of oils in dry hopping, explains that unlike alpha acids, which are stable throughout the growing life of a hop, oils increase. “At the beginning of the summer, there’s hardly any oil in the plant, and it just keeps going and going and going throughout the season.”
Once the hops are ready, it’s time to brew. “It is imperative to loosely pack your undried hops and get them into a kettle within hours of harvest,” Matt explains. “The high moisture and oil content at harvest also start to break down and physically compost once the vine is cut. In Hood River we are about 90 minutes from Sodbuster Farms, so we send our truck about the same time as mash in. The hops arrive back at the brewery typically minutes from use in the first brew.” When I’ve made fresh-hop ales at home, I’ve harvested them after mashing in for maximum freshness. (See Growing Your Own Hops.)
Across the Pacific Northwest, where hundreds of these beers are made each autumn, the variation in base beer is small — a basic pale ale with few malt flavors or fermentation notes to compete with the glorious flavors and aromas of the fresh hops. From there it’s all about hop usage.
“We use the wet hops in a couple of locations,” Swihart says in describing his process. Double Mountain makes two standard fresh-hop beers, Killer Red and Killer Green. They are similar ales, stronger (both above 7% ABV) and more bitter than standard fresh-hop ales. “We still use dried hops in the kettle for bitterness but add a dry-hop bag stuffed with fresh hops late in the boil for flavor. Where the Killer beers get most of their character is when we add the largest charge of wet hops to our hop back. This maximizes the flavor/fresh-hop aroma into the wort with minimal chance of picking up bitterness. It allows us to use 4 to 5 pounds of hop per barrel and get the flavor we want.
“We’ve then dry-hopped with traditional hops and/or also dry-hopped with wet hops on various years. I found the most pleasing Killer beers to have a little of both. With that method, you can have the best of both worlds, using various forms of hops (pellets, wet hops, dried cones) to make the best beer possible. Our usage is roughly 4 pounds per barrel wet hop and about 0.5 to 1 pound per barrel traditional hop.”
Matt Swihart
Double Mountain Brewery
Ferment with “an estery yeast with high attenuation.” Matt suggests Wyeast 1028 (London Ale), Wyeast 1762 (Belgian Abbey II), or Wyeast 1272 (American Ale II).
Dry-hop with 1–1.5 pounds fresh hops for 5 days at 70°F (21°C) at the end of fermentation. Cool after conditioning to drop yeast, package in keg (ideally) or bottle.
Notes: You’ll notice immediately that the recipe calls for pounds of hops, not ounces. This isn’t a misprint; it’s because of the high moisture content of fresh hops. Swihart notes, “Kilned hops are anywhere between 9 and 13 percent water. Fresh hops are 80 to 85 percent water, so although they are higher in oil content, you really do need a ton of them for the correct effect. We use five to seven times more fresh hops by weight than standard hops on any beer.” Matt recommends Perle, Brewer’s Gold, Sterling, Bullion, or Cascade for fresh hops, but “honestly, best quality supply wins over variety.” He urges brewers to “drink soon, drink often.”
Breweries have experimented with different styles — lagers, saisons, dark ales — but these invariably interfere with the perception of the fresh hop. Now most breweries make a very basic pale ale and vary fresh-hop additions to create original flavors. Many breweries have come to believe that hop oils are paramount. Not only should you harvest hops later but consider using high-oil varieties.
Gigantic Brewing’s Van Havig emphasizes this point. “I think it really all lies in hop choice. The higher-oil hops seem to make better fresh-hop beers. This makes intuitive sense, of course.” Many of the highest-oil hops are proprietary American varieties such as Citra, Amarillo, and Simcoe (not always available to homebrewers), but classics such as Centennial, Nugget, and Crystal also have excellent oil content.
Many brewers are reluctant to use fresh hops in the boil at all. Havig says, “I think boiling extracts things you don’t want and potentially drives off oil.” He uses fresh hops only in the hop back, a method also favored at Deschutes, which makes some of the best fresh-hop beers available. Cam O’Connor (now with Crux Fermentation) says, “We're looking for juicy in-your-face hop aroma and flavor without a lot of vegetative flavors. Hop Trip and Chasin’ Freshies are both made [this way].”
Other brewers go further and suggest keeping the hops away from heat entirely, only using them during conditioning. Vasilios Gletsos, now at Hill Farmstead, elaborates. “When I moved to Portland Brewing, I didn’t have the flexibility to use fresh hops on the hot side [the kettle], so I devised a plan to add them in secondary/conditioning tanks. We did this as whole flower breweries do: stuffed into mesh bags and tied to the bottom of the vessel. This gave the best ‘fresh squeezed’ flavor I have ever gotten from fresh hops. A beautiful mix of peach fruit cup with a touch of tea.”
If you do use this technique, don’t leave the hops in too long. O’Connor says, “Forty-eight to 72 hours seems good before racking it off, which limits contact with the vegetal matter that may be contributing to [unpleasant] flavors.”
I have a nearly perfect canopy of leaves over my backyard, so I’ve had to rely on the kindness of strangers (and friends) for my own fresh hops. It’s a shame, because hops are easy to grow and make for a lovely harvest. Although some sources say hops grow best north of the 35th parallel (north of many Southern states and Texas), that’s not really true. Commercial crops may grow better in the long days of the Pacific Northwest, but home farmers have been pulling fine crops from their backyards as far south as Florida.
Hop rhizomes — roots that look something like ginger — are widely available and inexpensive; consult your local homebrew shop or do an Internet search. One of the challenges in home hop cultivation is knowing which varieties will express themselves well in your local climate and soil. Even hops grown in different climates in the Pacific Northwest (Yakima and the Willamette Valley) are different, so hops will definitely behave differently in North America’s varied climates. If you plan to dry your hops and use them conventionally, consider a versatile hop that you can use in many recipes. If you’re using them principally for fresh-hop beers, varieties with a proven track record are Cascade, Crystal, Centennial, and Nugget.
For the best yield make sure your hops have room to climb. Hop bines can grow to 20 feet, and they strive to go up. They don’t need elaborate structures — a simple wire is adequate — but they won’t grow well horizontally. Also make sure you don’t plant them under shade; hops need direct sunlight and lots of it. Once you get the hops into the ground, don’t expect a full harvest the first year — it usually takes another growing season before they produce fully.
Mature hops are dry and papery to the touch but still springy when squeezed. Never wait until the petal edges begin to turn brown. At harvest they should be sticky and aromatic and show visible traces of lupulin (yellow powder). Hold the hop in both hands, and split it vertically along the spine. When the hops are ready, it will split easily, and you’ll see heavy lupulin deposits and get an intense aroma.
When we cast our eyes to other countries, we look with fondness at unusual practices and ingredients. No one questions why brewers use rye in Finland and Russia, wheat in Europe, rice in Asia, or sorghum in Africa. Indeed, the use of local grain is one of the hallmarks of national tradition, one we admire elsewhere. Why then do Americans so despise their own native grain?
There’s nothing wrong with corn. Many Americans are unaware that it is a common ingredient in Belgian beers with pedigrees as august as Rodenbach. Like any other ingredient, it can be put to malign use, but it can also be harnessed to add interest and character to a beer and, importantly, a bit of local flavor here at home. More important, in the last great flourishing of American brewing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it helped give character to pilsners, cream ales, and some forgotten beers such as American weissbier and Kentucky common ales.
The great irony is that over time its association with mass-market lagers gave corn the reputation of being something cheap and industrial. In a time when local ingredients are being feted, though, corn should be enjoying a renaissance among brewers as the American ingredient. It is time to rediscover our national grain and rehabilitate its reputation.
The craft beer movement is now old enough that former prejudices are being reexamined, and fortunately, a few breweries have begun to reclaim corn. One of the leaders is Durham’s Fullsteam Brewery, which considers using local ingredients a part of its mission. Its founder, Sean Lilly Wilson, has a goal of using 50 percent local ingredients in all his beers by 2020. That’s a challenge when you consider that most of the nation’s barley fields are far to the north, and the hop fields are even farther away. The region’s focus on local produce makes this goal realistic, though; local growers have already been coaxed into producing barley and hops. And in the most interesting experiment with local ingredients, “yeast wranglers” have been hard at work trying to find a native strain of Saccharomyces to use as the house yeast.
The brewery is well known for its beers made with local persimmons, basil, and sweet potatoes, but Fullsteam is also a big champion of corn. Locally sourced grains (both barley and corn) are used in El Toro, a cream ale, and corn adds a wonderfully light snap to Paycheck Pilsner. There’s a comfort and familiarity in both of these beers that comes from a hint of corn on the palate. It tracks as very slightly sweet and, given corn’s association with Southern cuisine, recognizably local. When he founded Fullsteam, Wilson said, “We earnestly wanted to explore what it meant to craft distinctly Southern beer.” Turning to corn was one obvious way to communicate that goal.
Like many professional brewers, Mandeville started as a homebrewer, a passion he pursued for a decade before going pro. While his interest in brewing grew, he worked as a political campaign field organizer — he has a degree in political science — radio station director, and distribution manager for the New York Times.
Eventually, his love of beer led him to Virginia’s O’Connor Brewing in 2011, and then to Fullsteam in 2015. Along the way he augmented his knowledge by studying at Siebel and picking up a certificate in brewing technology. One of his big interests at Fullsteam is incorporating local ingredients and particularly the work on isolating a strain of native Saccharomyces to use in the brewery.
Corn’s principal use, since German immigrants figured out how to deploy it in concert with protein-rich American six-row barley, has been to lighten beer. You don’t taste it in many corn beers because the brewer doesn’t want you to: he’s using corn as a way of adding fermentable sugar without adding body — that’s why it’s invisible in Belgian beer. The idea that corn should conceal itself behind the flavor of barley is a remnant of two different prejudices, one by European brewers who think of barley as the “proper” flavor and one by Americans who associate corn with the dilution of flavor by industrial breweries.
But it’s also possible to use corn to add flavor, particularly in light-bodied pale ales and lagers. “Corn is a fantastic ingredient,” says Fullsteam’s Mandeville. “It can be used to give a beer a slightly drier mouthfeel and in the right amounts can add a layer of pleasant cornlike flavors and aromas.” You most commonly see corn used in pre-Prohibition lagers and cream ales, but it works wonderfully as a way of signaling the New World. That’s exactly what Steven Pauwels used it for when he made his American farmhouse, Tank 7, and it seems especially appropriate in rustic ales.
The second brewery I toured in Belgium was Palm’s, in Steenhuffel. When we got to the brewhouse, I encountered a vessel I’d never seen before: a cereal cooker. Typical in Belgium, it was created to gelatinize corn, readying it for the enzymatic activity that will break down starches into sugars when added to the main mash. This is a time-consuming process, and while it’s possible for homebrewers to do cereal mashing (see Cereal Mashing), there’s a much easier solution.
Here’s Mandeville: “The easiest, by far, is to use flaked corn (malted, flaked, or torrefied [puffed] versions). In this case the cereal has already been gelatinized and can be added to the mash of even a single infusion brew with great success.”
After Thomas Morgan’s first batch of American weissbier, members of his homebrew club in Ohio all went home and started working with corn to see what they could come up with. Morgan shipped me out a 12-pack containing the group’s effort, and the range of flavors was impressive.
You can also use this product at the commercial scale, as Fullsteam does in Paycheck Pilsner. It’s even possible to use popcorn.
“You read that correctly,” Mandeville joked to me. “I said popcorn. The process of popping it will gelatinize the corn, and it will be mash ready. The trick to this is that you need popcorn without any additives: no oils, butter flavoring, or other strange things.” When you see the word “torrefied” applied to grain, this is what they’re talking about. (I haven’t heard homebrew nerds kidding about “torrefied corn” at the theater, but they could.)
Corn can make up any percentage of the grist, though when added as a lightener in commercial breweries, it typically doesn’t exceed 20 percent. A few years back homebrewer (and University of Dayton professor) Thomas Morgan began experimenting with revival recipes taken from a classic old text by authors Robert Wahl and Max Henius called the American Handy-Book of the Brewing, Malting, and Auxiliary Trades. He started with a beer they called American Weissbier, a 30 percent corn beer based on Berliner weisse. Replicating the nineteenth-century standards, he used 50 percent six-row barley and 20 percent wheat along with 30 percent corn. He described it as “delightful and refreshing” but said, “the corn is there, but not as much as I would have thought.” This illustrates why corn is used in industrial breweries — it can easily disappear in front of your eyes. Morgan was intrigued by corn’s potential and continued experimenting.
The lessons of that experiment support my own conclusions. (You can read about them at Morgan’s blog, What We’re Drinking.) Morgan found that the corn contributed only fairly subtle flavors of sweetness and corn. The effect on body and mouthfeel is more pronounced. Corn lightens as expected but also gives a beer a clean, crisp quality that seems almost lagerlike (no wonder it was used in cream ales). But because it also contributes to the perception of sweetness, a beer made with corn will finish crisply but leave a kiss of sugar behind. This is that comforting, familiar quality I described, and although subtle, it adds a nice dimension to these beers.
At this point my position on corn’s legitimacy is probably coming through loud and clear, but it’s worth acknowledging that corn and rice have until recent years been as popular as a GMO salesman at an organic food convention. They fall into a category Americans call “adjuncts,” which also includes sugar and other cereal grains. In the early days of craft brewing, Americans were motivated in large part by wanting to bring quality and craftsmanship back to brewing. They rejected anything that smacked of industrial shortcuts, such as using “fillers” in beer to boost alcohol cheaply. This reflected an element of naïveté, since many of the traditional beers of Europe are made using wheat, corn, and sugar, but it was an important statement of purpose for the times.
When the trade organization representing craft breweries formed, it held the use of adjuncts in contempt, codifying this view. The Brewers Association wrote that a member must “either [have] an all-malt flagship (the beer which represents the greatest volume among that brewer’s brands) or [have] at least 50% of its volume in either all-malt beers or in beers which use adjuncts to enhance rather than lighten flavor.” It didn’t seem to occur to the organization that corn might be an expression of American identity and heritage.
In 2014 the Brewers Association acknowledged its mistake. “The revised definition recognizes that adjunct brewing is quite literally traditional, as brewers have long brewed with what has been available to them.” The new definition no longer mentions adjuncts or carries the bias against their use. It’s probably time to retire the concept of “adjunct” altogether. Beer can be and has been made of a range of local grains native to the region, and the idea of calling some of them adjuncts reflects nothing more than unexamined chauvinism.
Brian Mandeville
Fullsteam
Keg or bottle.
Notes: You can adjust the grist to suit your interests, going up to 30 percent corn and substituting some portion of the six-row malt with two-row. Six-row malt has more enzymatic power than two-row, which is useful in converting the corn — although, as Mandeville notes, “modern two-row malt should be able to handle it just fine.” This recipe was designed to be used in conjunction with a cereal mash, which is described in Cereal Mashing. If you do a cereal mash, everything else in the recipe remains the same.
It’s worth taking a moment to mention American six-row malt, which is a natural dancing partner for corn. Two- and six-row barleys are distinguished by the way they grow on the stalk; six-row barley grows in a tighter pattern around the stalk and therefore each seed is less plump than two-row seeds; two-row seeds are flared out to each side of the stalk, giving them some room to fatten up.
A century ago the difference between the two varieties was marked, and the husky, high-protein, and lower-starch six-row was substantially inferior. It did have the benefit of having greater enzyme content, which helped convert the starches in corn, which lacked enzymes. (This is why they worked well together.) Beyond that, the higher protein content can lead to a haziness in the beer, and the thicker husk can create astringency on the palate. Again, both of these issues are mitigated when corn is used as part of the grist.
We don’t tend to think of “tradition” when we’re talking about the old practice of using six-row malt and corn together. They are often counted as compromises to the “right” way of brewing — an industrial sop to the bottom line. Think about it another way. From the perspective of a Bavarian lager brewer, there’s nothing right about the way Belgian saison or English cask ale is made, either. They violate many of the tenets of Reinheitsgebot — and are just philosophically very different beers. American beers made with six-row and corn are no more “wrong” by this formulation than other traditional European ales.
What’s more, they constitute an important tradition in American brewing. Most of the old nineteenth-century beer styles grew out of this tandem, and they create a typical “American” set of characteristics. Experiment with the ratios, maybe even throwing wheat (a great American standard) into the mix.
The final step for a classic American taste is hop selection. Mandeville uses Goldings in El Toro, and he recommends them in this recipe. But if you are looking for a throwback hop, consider Cluster, the grandfather of American hop varieties. The variety was dominant at the end of the nineteenth century (96 percent of all hops) and well into the twentieth. Many of these old American hops were originally European varieties crossed with American (or Canadian) wild hop varieties. They were strident, sometimes harsh hops that give sharp bitterness, a characteristic black current flavor, and sometimes a note critics refer to as “cat piss.” (Delightful!)
Hops tend to drift over the years, taking on characteristics of nearby varieties, and modern Clusters do not exhibit especially objectionable flavors. Clusters do retain a rough-hewn, rustic quality that is another signal of local tradition. Other old-school American hops you might try are Galena, Brewer’s Gold, and Comet.
Most homebrewers will not bother to conduct a cereal mash on their corn; it’s just too damn much trouble. But some homebrewers will want to try it anyway — maybe because it’s too damn much trouble. If you find yourself in that latter category, Brian Mandeville has you covered. Here are his instructions.
To understand the procedure, it may be necessary to understand some of the science behind what cereal mashing does: gelatinization. Gelatinization is the swelling and disorganization of starch granules after being heated in water. There are several indicators that we look for to determine when we have successfully gelatinized the grain we are working with. Generally speaking, you will notice the swelling of the individual kernels, an increase in the viscosity, increased translucency, and an increased solubility. Anyone who has made corn grits before should be familiar with these signs, as this is the same process that changes hard grits into a creamy delicious dish. Now to the process.
Begin by milling your cereal adjuncts (you will want to mill them to about half the size of your standard crush for brewing; preground corn grits work great for this process). Now add 10 to 20 percent of your milled base barley malt (this base malt will be the source of some needed enzymes).
Add hot water to this grain mixture (50 percent of your total mash water) in your kettle. It is useful to stir this mixture because it sticks easily and can form into a kind of grit cake that is neither pleasant to eat nor does it make good beer.
Begin to heat up your kettle and bring the mixture to the appropriate gelatinization temperature for the cereal adjuncts you are working with. Each kind of grain (from oats to corn) has an optimal temperature range at which this occurs. For corn we’re looking to hold the mixture between the low 140s F (60–62°C) and as high as the mid-160s F (73–74°C). You will now want to hold the mixture there for 30 minutes, continuing to stir to avoid scorching and sticking.
Now raise the temperature of your mash until you achieve a mild boil (keep an extremely close eye on it during this stage of the process, as cereal mashes have a tendency to boil over very quickly). You will want to boil the mash for another 30 minutes. This is when the signs of gelatinization that were mentioned earlier should become the most evident.
Meanwhile, in your mash tun dough in your remaining grist and water (the other 50 percent of your total mash water). You will need to preheat your mash tun with hot water, but you can use room temperature water to dough in the remainder of your grist. Don’t worry too much about your mash temperature at this stage; we will be using the hot cereal mash to dramatically increase the mash temperature.
After it has boiled for 30 minutes, move the hot cereal mash into your mash tun with your cold mash, and mix vigorously to achieve an even temperature. Some additional hot or cold water may be needed to adjust your temperature.
Continue your conversion phase, recirculation, and sparge as you would normally for the rest of the mash.
