perfidy

By the way, when it comes to barbarism, I'm no one to talk. We mostly used canned malt extract for our stuff.

Twenty years!?!?

Man... then you have missed out on the yeast revolution! There's so much good stuff out there now... and fast fermenting so infection is much more rare.

In truth, dry-hopping is a very small infection risk no matter what you do; hops are a natural antibiotic, and part of the reason that beer's beer is because it resists easy infestation.

All I have to say is, homebrewing is the best, and get back on that horse and ride it!!

It was more like 30 years ago, when I was in my 20's. I can believe that there's been a lot of change. Technically speaking, I was a bootlegger when I did it, because Oregon hadn't yet legalized it. The law wasn't enforced, and we bought our supplies from a store in Portland that sold the stuff openly, but strictly speaking we were breaking the law.

It wasn't as popular a hobby back then, and this (the late 1970's) was largely before the micro-brewery revolution. So I'm not too surprised to learn that things have changed a lot.

For me the biggest surprise was to discover just how foul wort tastes. Yeast is a miracle; to think that it can convert something so utterly horrible as wort into something as good tasting as beer, it must be.

I stopped drinking 13 years ago so I don't have any recent advice. But I did some brewing when I was in my 20's, and as you've already noticed the brewing is so much fun that you get ahead of yourself and the beer stacks up.

What I do remember was that we used loose Cascade hop flowers (as you say), and that we kept about one ounce of them for after the boiling process. We did our primary ferment in a vat (a plastic garbage can, actually) and the remaining hops went into a "teabag", which meant they were wrapped up in cheesecloth which was tied shut with wire or fishing line or dental floss and dangled into the wort while it was fermenting. (We found that bailing wire worked the best, because then you could make a hook to dangle the teabag off the edge of the garbage can.) That gives you an amazingly fresh hoppy flavor in your beer that can't really be gotten any other way.

But we were making steam beers, not ales, and maybe it needs to be different if you use an ale yeast instead of a lager yeast. Likely the fresh hops would be a major source of infection for an ale.

Considering the way you clearly abused your recent batch, and the fact that you're using ale yeast, I'm really astounded that it didn't turn. You're really lucky. One of the reasons we did steam beers is that lager yeast is more forgiving about that kind of thing.

If you use hop pellets in your beer you're a barbarian. Loose Cascade Hops are the only way to go!

Oh Steven. Steven, Steven, Steven.

....

I got nothing. You're right, actually. Hop flowers are the way to go, especially for aroma and flavor. But I gotta say, Pellets store better than whole hops, and that's important to me since I tend to buy a couple recipes at once and then freeze the hops until I brew, which might be a couple months down the line. Also, I see no point in using whole hops for bittering - you lose all the pretty flavors anyway, so why not use a nice gentle bittering hop like Perle (for noble type needs), Eroica (for clean bitterness) or Galena (for deeper bitterness) in pellet form and save some wort? There's that tradeoff between nasty hop sludge to strain out and hop flowers to squeeze dry at the end, and either way its' a pain in the butt.

That being said, I do use whole hops pretty often, especially for my pet varieties - Saaz, Hallertau Mittlefreuh, and a really nice blend of Cascade and EKG I use again and again because it's awesome.

The way I figure it, as long as I'm using extract, I'm halfway a barbarian anyway.

At least I don't touch high-alpha varieties. So nasty!