This ExBEERiment is: Dry hopping corona in the bottle.
Similar to split batches, exBEERiments are ways of testing things (generally in the bottle) that you’ve read or heard of, but never seen first-hand. You might lose a bottle or two in the process, but hopefully you’ll learn a lot more!
We’ve started to build up a big supply of half bags of different hops, and were thinking of doing a “stone soup” beer with them. Then we decided to do this instead. We grabbed a 6 pack of the lightest beer we could find in a pop top bottle (corona) and dry hopped each bottle. We re-capped, then waited 1 week and did a tasting.
Hypothesis
Adding different dry hops to a bland base beer will help illustrate the benefits of dry hopping with each variety.
Experiment
Dry hop 6 bottles of corona and re-cap them. Wait 1 week and drink them side-by-side and note differences.
Results
Tettnang
tea like
green tea with honey
big carbonation
Gold (ekg?)
tiny bit of spice, but overall not much flavor
not much carb
Chinook
tiny bit of dried tea.
Bitterness is surprising
not a lot of flavor.
Citra
orange
peachy smoothness
much more flavor in the nose
dried tea taste maybe is from the hops, not a specific taste
Zythos
ross smelled rubbing alcohol
chris smelled hot garbage, overripe banana or something. I dunno.
Cascade
fizzed like crazy when opened.
Conclusion
The bitterness was surprisingly high because there wasn’t a boil. The lack of noticeable aromas in such high concentrations was surprising. We both had much higher expectations for this one. I thought that the differences in the hops would be immediately noticeable, but the biggest taste was often the “dried tea” flavor that can be present in anything dry hopped. Citra by far had the most nose, followed by cascade and perhaps zythos.
Next time
If anyone follows in my shoes I would try to use fresher hops, and experiment with different lengths of time. 1 week seemed like it was too long, as it brought out the vegetal grassy flavors, but maybe it was simply too short to bring out the better flavors.
*I saw that great term (exBEERiment) on a blog a while back and it was just too good to not steal it!