We met Aaron from Great Southern Hops a couple of years ago, and have enjoyed learning more about what Great Southern Hops have got going on.
We decided to try their new Beedelup hop cones as a part of the Villains experimental program because it sounded like a very unique hop that had big potential.
The decision to go with an IPL to support this hop was pretty easy. We love IPL, and the profile we expected from the hops would work well against a moderately strong lager.
The Process
The first time I used whole hop cones I threw them in the kettle and let them do their thing. That ended up with a 40% loss of liquid, because 10kg of hop cones became a metric shit-tonne of wet hop matter, which blocked the entire kettle outlet and transfer pipes and hoses! It took me around 2 hours of climbing around in the (cooled) kettle picking out hop flowers and flushing the system before I could use the brewhouse again!
This time we put the cones into hop bags and hung from the top of the kettle to avoid those issues.
During fermentation we got huge hits of guava and passionfruit that were just amazing. Then the next day it would have nothing! Then it would come back again. Weird.
After dry hop the beer settled down and now delivers a very fresh, light but very present guava aroma. And it tastes amazing!
Give it a shot!