Ingredient Deep Dive: Elixir Hops SMaSH Pale Ale Homebrew Tasting

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Our homebrew club’s most excellent education officer, not to mention exceptionally highly ranked beer judge, and the organizer of several BJCP classes, Brad, made a purchase of several pounds of hops that were on sale. He came up with the idea to pass them out to a group of us, each brewing a SMASH Pale Ale.
Mike asked for elixir hops, they sounded really interesting. As you can see from this Yakima Valley page about the Elixir Hop, these hops “offer unique aromas of congac, leather, and tobacco that are backed by sweet citrus fruits as well as rose and lovage”. Elixir hops are a French hop.

At the time of the video Mike had no idea what lovage was, but it’s a herb native to Europe related to parsley, cilantro, dill and fennel, as well as carrots and celery (https://www.planetnatural.com/growing-lovage/).

Jesse selected El Dorado Hops, famously used in Weldworks Juicy Bits (a local favorite in Colorado), a tropical and fruity hop. Unfortunately, his keg had a leak, and all of it was pushed out into the keezer. Yes, disaster even strikes us sometimes.

If you’re interested in making a SMaSH beer, check out this easy peasy recipe.
https://cobrewtalk.com/basic-smash-pale-ale-recipe-all-grain-biab

Our group consisted of 11 homebrewers, who used the following hop varieties in their SMaSH:
El Dorado, Belma, Triumph, Sultana, Sequoia, Nugget, Cashmere, Elixir, Zappa, Idaho Gem and Vista.

Colorado Brew Talk would like to apologize to the country of France, and all of you out there from France or with French heritage, for our terrible accents. Really, we’re immature and couldn’t help ourselves 🙂

Have you brewed with Elixir? Have a favorite hop to use in the same recipe? Make any good SMaSH beers or have another hop you’ve experimented with? Let us know!

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Opening Music is Rock Jam Band courtesy of TheoTer on FreeSound – https://freesound.org/people/TheoTer/sounds/569778/