Irish Red Ale, received wrong hops... Brewed anyway

Hey all,

This is my first post and my second attempt at brewing over all. I’ve currently got some American Wheat in my fermenter. I purchased another starter kit for my girlfriend and got the Irish red ale to brew. We started seeping the specialty grains and realized too late that NB had sent us the wrong hop additions for this batch. Instead of sending 1 US goldings and 1 Willamette, we got 2 US Goldings instead. We figured there wasn’t much we could do in the way of a return since we had already started and either way we where too eager to wait any longer for new hops. So instead we figured that the US golding must be the strong of the 2 hops as it is the second edition. So to account for this we added 1 OZ. for 45 and the second at the recommended 30. I suppose it is now a single hopped Irish Red. Does anyone have an idea what kind of results we might get from this?, I hope we where right in our assumption that the US goldings was a bit stronger and this won’t come out under hopped.

My wild guess is that you did alright. They must have specified alpha acid percent on the hop packages. How much was that compared to the recipe? As long as the alpha acids of the bittering addition on the recipe was reasonably close to the actual US Goldings received, you should be fine. Anyway, what do you think people did 100 years ago before they knew anything about alpha acid? They just threw in an ounce of whatever hops they had around. You’re fine. You’re still going to make a good red ale.

I’d imagine Goldings and Willamette are pretty close as far as AA% so like Dave said, I think you’ll be fine.

My friend (no, not me) switched his hops around on his first batch. The two were actually quite different, alpha acid wise, but he still ended up with five gallons of yummy beer.

I think (and my perspective is that of a fairly new brewer) is that you will be unable to tell that anything was wrong since you don’t have the right thing to compare it to. It will likely turn out great and you will realize that it was far from a terrible thing.

I still remember how much I worried about stuff like that, and I still do, but now I am more curious about the results.

i like Goldings more than Willamette anyway :lol:

if everything works out right, im sure you will have a fine irish red :cheers:

Willamette is like fuggles so you replaced a fuggles with a goldings. That’s not much difference and why the store substituted them.

I actually was just looking at recipes for an Irish Red the other day in an attempt to get ideas to improve my own. Several of those recipes just had Goldings hops with no Willamette, so I don’t think you really have anything to worry about.

The NB Irish Red kit was actually my first beer I ever brewed. GREAT beer! Cheers!

Give NB a call and explain exactly what you stated in your OP. 1) You will enjoy the beer you brewed. 2) Would not surprise me if NB were to replace that kit and make it right. Then, you will be able to compare.

This was probably no mistake and you could have brewed per instructions. I really like Goldings myself, it is a good dual purpose hop and totally appropriate for the Irish Red style. My guess is that NB just made the sub on purpose and hadn’t had time to change the instructions, it was most likely not a screwup.

I think there are two threads about this same problem going on right now. I brewed this NB batch recently with the right hops in the wrong order, and the hops NB has been putting in this kit for the last couple months have had the Willamette and Goldings within 1% AA of each other. Brew it with what you have and it’ll be great.

Little update: Let this sit for 1 month in primary, no secondary, has been in bottles for 6 days so far, tried a bottle today and it is wonderful. I am extremely impressed after only 6 days bottle conditioning. Can’t wait to try this in another week!

I have an Irish red ale recipe that uses only goldings.
You can’t go wrong using goldings in any U.K. style. :cheers: