Single-Malt and Single-Hop (SMaSH) beers offer the opportunity to strip a beer down to the bare essentials. No complicated grain bills or hop lineups! They make learning about individual ingredients easy.

We will have several SMaSH Challenges this year. For the April meeting we are highlighting dry-hopping. First, the base recipe:

All-grain (for 5 gallons):

• 10 lbs American 2-Row Pale Malt
• 0.8 oz Magnum hops (60 minute addition)
• WLP 001 California Ale Yeast

Mash at 154 degrees for 60 minutes.

Extract (for 5 gallons):

• 7.5 lbs American 2-Row Pale Malt
• 0.8 oz Magnum hops (60 minute addition)
• WLP 001 California Ale Yeast

My OG was 1.050. Ferment at 64 degrees.

I brewed 3 gallons of this recipe (scaling appropriately) and after one week, I split the batch into three, one gallon jugs, adding 0.5 oz of Mosaic, El Dorado and X-hops pellets, one variety per jug. I used hop bags and anticipated lower extraction than if I had just dumped in the pellets, so I used more than I would otherwise. Maybe 0.3oz per gallon would be a good amount without hop bags. I dry-hopped for one week, then removed the hop bags (but didn’t have time to bottle for another week).

One thing I’d like to try is dry-hopping during fermentation. The yeast apparently interacts with the hop oils, and according to some Zymurgy article I can’t find, dry-hopping during fermentation results in stone fruit characteristics, while dry-hopping after fermentation is mostly complete results in citrusy, piny and floral notes.

If you want to participate, comment below which hops you’d like to experiment with and whether you intend to dry-hop during or after fermentation.