Antihero (Forum Supporter) said:
Basically I thought it would be fun to get one of those little 1 gallon kits and make a stout with as little hops as possible and maybe try to capture the smokiness of a good Islay Scotch somehow, mixes 2 things I love.
But reading up you have people saying stuff like " ....you gotta add a bunch of hops to stouts so you can get a decent flavor, gotta mask the stoutness somehow"
In this situation, they're partially right, and partially wrong, but don't understand the what and why. You could make a beer that does what you want without much trouble (although it would probably require more than just modifying an off-the-shelf 1-gallon kit), but they don't know enough about brewing to tell you how. It's the homebrew equivalent of someone saying you need lowering springs to make a car handle well.
So... flavor science... for a beer to be balanced, you generally want to have a flavor irritant to balance out residual malt sweetness. Most often, this is bitterness from hops, but you could use sour or astringent. The problem with so many IPAs is that they go overboard on the bitterness and end up with an unbalanced beer.
It's like... salt or vinegar. Salt or vinegar are integral flavor components in a lot of food. But if you put too much in, it's going to be gross.
A stout will tend to have a lot more residual malt body and sweetness and does require more bitterness to balance that. At my brewery, our stout is handily our most bitter beer. When I worked at North Coast, Old Rasputin was far and away the most bitter beer. Guinness is more bitter than Sierra Nevada Pale.
However, that still means less hops than an IPA. Hops are much more efficient at bittering than they are at getting aroma (another reason why so many IPA's suck, because brewers end up *thinking* they're getting aroma, when they're really getting bitterness). So even though our stout is more bitter than our IPA, it still only uses about 1/3 the hops of the IPA (and about 1/2 the hops of our lager).
Now, if you really wanted to brew a dark, smokey beer with no or fewer hops, you could, but would need to make some changes. You could get away with less hops, but you'd want to use a yeast strain that leaves less fermentable sugars. Probably also adjust the malt bill a touch. You could easily make it unhopped by substituting spruce or cedar tips (which will provide astringency) and maybe heather (if you want nice aroma). Of course, now you're ending up with something more like a dark Scotch ale than an Irish or Burton-upon-Trent style Stout. Not that this would be bad. It would be quite good, but I wouldn't label it a "Stout".
This would actually work quite well if you want to lean in the "Islay Scotch" direction. That smoke will serve as a flavor irritant to balance things, but you will also want to control residual sweetness so the beer isn't cloying and doesn't stick the smoke to the inside of your mouth.
Pete. (l33t FS) said:
In reply to Beer Baron :
"What are those things floating in the beer?"
"Those are hops."
" *sigh* What are those things hopping in the beer?"
I hate this trend. It shows a complete misunderstanding of hop utilization. I understand wanting to maximize hop aroma. I have several beers where I do that. But by the time you get floaties, you're gone well past the point where you're able to extract any more aromatics from the hops and are literally just ending up with undissolved hop matter for the sake of throwing in more hops so that you can spend more money to have less beer.
Yet people want "hazy" IPA.
My answer to this was, "FINE! YOU WANT HAZY? YOU KNOW WHAT'S HAZY?!? berkeleyING HEFEWEIZEN! HAVE AN IPA WITH HEFEWEIZEN YEAST!"
We also purposely ran a 'train of wrong-ness' that would be a steam loco pulling well cars with a Penn Central caboose, or any similar combination. Used to drive the know-it-alls absolutely insane.
