El Dorado Pale Ale Hop Schedule

[GDoucet]

I’m brewing a pale ale with all El Dorado hops for the first time and it’s also my first time using a high alpha acid hop in this recipe (14.3%). Based on my previous versions of this recipe I’m targeting around 35 IBU but I want to put in a lot of late hop additions. Based on my hop schedule, I would achieve this with all my additions with 20min or less left in the boil. Maybe it’s my inexperience with high alpha acid hops but not having an addition at 60min kind of weirds me out. Any thoughts? Here’s my hop schedule:

0.5oz @ 20min
0.75oz @ 10min
0.75oz @ 5min
2oz @ 0min
2oz Dry hop

Any feedback on the hop schedule too would be much appreciated.

[Keith]

I'd move that 20min to 50 min, and lower your late additions closer to 5 min and 0 and increase the amount of late hops you are using. Not sure a 20 min addition ill be enough to take the bulk of the sweetness away from the malt.

[LiverDance]

If it's getting you the ibu you want leave the schedule as is. I recently did the same thing with an el dorado wheat and was very happy with the late addition bitterness I got from 20 mins down

[mumblecrunch]

In November I made a red using this recipe plus a dry hop for 10 days of 1oz each of Centennial and Amarillo. That's a very similar hop bill to what you have there. I'm exceedingly happy with the way it turned out.

Remember that regardless of how high the alpha acid content is, with them only in the boil for 20 minutes max there's a limit to how much isomerization is going to happen and that's going to limit your bitterness to a large degree. Many folks here also completely disregard any IBU contributions of hops added with less than 10 minutes left in the boil regardless of what the software might say.