Now this is a technique I’m going to try in a homebrew at some stage in the future.

Greatly simplified, the brewing process involves soaking grain in water to get the sugars out, then pouring the liquid into a pot, boiling it and adding hops at various stages for flavour.

Some odd images come up when you google “mash hopping”. Like this one here.

What mash hopping is all about is adding hops in with the soaking grain, meaning they’re in contact with the wort for longer. It’s supposed to impart extra texture and complexity to the beer without adding bitterness because the hops themselves aren’t being boiled (hops chucked in at the start of the boil are there to create bitterness in the finished beer.

It makes sense that the best beers to use this technique on are the lighter styles where the subtle hop notes created aren’t overpowered by later additions. But still some American brewers use it to pack in more hops in their IPAs – and those US brewers love their hops.

What’s the go here?: For those who have just stumbled across this post, I’m going through the awesome  Oxford Companion to Beer (OCB) and posting an entry for every letter. Why? Because I have a copy at home but hadn’t really gone through it page by page and I figured this would be an exercise that would force me to do that.