Hops

I have been out of brewing for about a year, as my wife and I decided to put the house up for sale last year, sold it in 5 days, and then decided to build. So we are about finished building and I plan on having a nice bar in the basement. I had been making my own recipes for extract with grains, and a few all grain batches. I have that down pretty well. The only thing I struggle with is what hops to use. I plan on having a couple steady beers at the bar,(brown ale, IPA, Oatmeal stout, and a wheat). I am curious what are good hops to start with for each style to get a nice baseline flavor and aroma to build on. Thanks in advance for an help or advice.

get a copy of designing great beers. that would be a start. on the ipa it depends on what flavor you want.

This is a tricky area because it’s best to taste the hops in a beer to get an impression of what the hops will be like. I know that there are A LOT of websites out there that will describe a hop’s character (neutral, piney, citrusy, woodsy, earthy, fruity, etc.) and that may be one way to do it. Your IPA could be made with neutral English hops or if you wanted it to be a more West Coast IPA, C-hops or Simcoe, Amarillo, etc. For the wheat you would want a more neutral hop (just a guess) so anything Noble (Tettnanger, Hersbrucker, Hallertau Mittelfruh, Spalt, Saaz) or Mt. Hood, Liberty, Crystal, etc. On the Brown… if it’s American then use an American hop (depending on what character you want) or English hops like EKG, Kent, Styrian Golding, Target, etc. If you ask the brewers here what hops they like in which styles, you’ll get some good answers but the only way to know what these hops taste like is to pick up commercial beers where you KNOW the variety of hops used in the beer or… make the beer yourself. :wink: