Hop Experimentation Series (Ahtanum)

Manitou is our New England IPA dry hopped with Galaxy Hops. Over the course of many batches we have tweaked our recipe and process to get an IPA we are really happy with. We are big fans of this beer, and plan on brewing it often. However, a big part of our brewing is a desire to learn about brewing. Thus, we don’t want to just brew the exact same beer over and over again and learn little from it (except that we can repeat it, which is also important). So we have decided to use the Manitou as the basis for a hop series. Each time we brew the Manitou, we will take one gallon of the wort and put it in a separate fermentor and dry hop it with a different hop.  The rest will be dry hopped with Galaxy like normal. This will provided us with a control to compare each hop to, and will allow us to make sure that any differences we taste each batch are due to the hop and not some mistake we made on our brew day.

For the first batch of this experiment we went with Ahtanum hop (Alphabetical Order).  Ahtanum is describes as having aroma descriptors of citrus, grapefruit, and geranium.  Compared with passionfruit and clean citrus aroma descriptors for Galaxy. No on to the fun part, the tasting.

Given the similarities between the description of both hops I was a little concerned that I would have trouble picking out a lot of differences between the two beers, but I was wrong, they were distinctly different. The beer dry hopped with Ahtanum seemed sweeter and gentler.  Both beers had citrus flavors, but they were much more pronounced in the beer dry hopped with Galaxy.  Overall I like both beers, but preferred the beer with Galaxy.