Can it be fixed this way?

I neglected my hop crop this year due to another commitment. I know they were on the vine to long and questioned whether they are good at all. To test them I made a batch of beer with only home grown hops. After all is said and done, the beer has little to no bitterness but plenty of taste and aroma from the hops.

Would it be possible to brew a one-gallon, highly bittered beer and add it to the 4 or so gallons I have of the test batch to bring bitterness up and save it? I would want the total mixture to reach 30IBU’s.

Possible? Worth it?

Thanks for the help.

I think it’s possible, but I’ve never done it. I’d go with 1 gallon of water and 1/2 oz of magnum or something big. Add some DME with 5 minutes left to reach the same OG as your other brew. Ferment it out and then blend in to taste.

It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to achieve over 100 IBUs in this 1G batch, and I think hop utilization is going to be lower than you find in regular 6 gallon boils. Tinseth method of calculating IBUs gives 200 IBUs for 1/2 oz of 14%AA at 60 minutes with no sugars. This might end up giving you around 100 IBUs, which would mean you could add 20 IBUs to the beer (as long as things are as simple in reality as they are in the math). Adding the sugars at the end will help with utilization, and since you don’t know how much bitterness you’ll have there, Don’t just blend it all. Taste the 1G batch post-fermentation to make sure it’s not totally nasty or infected, or way too harsh, then use eye droppers or something to do some trial blends in a glass before scaling up to the whole batch.

Most of what I’ve heard about blending batches is that if you make a beer that’s bad, you’re better off pouring it out than trying to save it by blending. Other than the lack of bitterness, is the first beer good?

Yes, the beer is good minus bitterness. It hardly cost me anything and again, was a test knowing it might not turn out. A gallon of beer will cost me about 3 dollars so I will try to save the batch. Thanks for the response.

You might look into using a hopshot??

Cheers!!!

[quote=“hamiltont”]You might look into using a hopshot??

Cheers!!![/quote]

That is a really good idea!

[quote=“hamiltont”]You might look into using a hopshot??

Cheers!!![/quote]
From what I understand, you’d still have to boil this to isomerize the alpha acids.