IPA Balance and Hop Products with Max Shafer – BeerSmith Podcast #341

Max Shafer joins me from Roadhouse Brewing to discuss achieving the perfect IPA balance, using new hop products and perfecting your Hazy IPA.

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Topics in This Week’s Episode (35:18)

This week I welcome back Max Shafer from Roadhouse Brewing in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Max was previously a brewer at Grand Teton brewing. Max sits on the Hop Research Council, is the Idaho ambassador to the Hop Quality Group, and associate member of the American Malting Barley Association. Max is a graduate of the Siebel Institute and has over 10 years as a professional brewer.
We start with a short discussion of some of the new beers and offerings at Roadhouse Brewing where they continue to innovate.
Max starts the technical discussion with a discussion on hop balance, and what he means by the proper hop balance for a Hazy IPA.
We talk about boil hops which lay the foundation for bitterness, and how his boil hop additions have evolved into a single 60 minute addition combined often with a shorter 20 minute addition.
Max next moves on to whirlpool additions, and we discuss the use of pellets here as well as some of the new hop products like Dynaboost and Incognito.
Next we discuss dry hopping and why pellets are still important here. He also talks about concentrated hop products like Subzero Hop Kief and Abstrax. We discuss the use of isomerized hop products and aroma additions for final tweaking of a beer as well.
Max tells us how he works backward from a finished beer to try to determine the best place to tweak hop balance – be it in the boil, whirlpool or dry hopping. He also makes extensive use of his small pilot brewery.
We next talk about gravity in the context of Hazy IPAs and how there seems to be a sweet spot in terms of the ideal gravity to balance out a Hazy IPA.
Max discusses drinkability as well as the push to lower gravity beers.
He tells us where to visit Roadhouse as well as their website (linked above) and how you can get their products.
He also gives us his closing thoughts.