One of the things Dogfish Head is known for is brewing with exotic ingredients – raisins, honeys, strawberries, scrapple, oranges, brown sugar, and even human saliva. If you can name it, odds are we’ve brewed with it. But there is one old world style Dogfish has embraced, tweaked and reinvented … the hop-forward India Pale Ale.
Hops are the go-to spice for beer. They add bold aromas and flavors – notes of pine, citrus, earthiness, floral and tropical fruit. Traditionally many brewers make two hop additions – one big dose of hops early in the boiling process for flavor and they add another bunch at the end for aroma.
Here at Dogfish, we like to take a more … continual approach.
What is continual hopping?
Well see, it all started with a bowl of soup and a vibrating football game. Back in the mid-90s, we started messing around with extreme and super hoppy IPAs. We would put foolhardy quantities of hops in these IPAs, and while people loved the pungent hoppiness of these beers, they had a really pronounced bitterness that seemed out of balance. Not quite what we were after. We wanted a really hoppy beer that wasn’t crushingly bitter.
One day while brewing at our original brewpub in downtown Rehoboth Beach, Del., Dogfish Head founder & brewer Sam Calagione caught a few minutes of a cooking segment on the TV above the bar. The chef was describing a method of adding small pinches of fresh-cracked pepper to soup in equal increments the entire time the soup boiled. The idea was simple – the method would bring more complexity and evenness to the spice of the dish than adding the whole volume of pepper at the same time. Insert an ‘aha’ moment … continual hopping was born!
Sam tracked down an old school vibrating football game and duct tapped a bucket to the top of it to help feed the beer a continual stream of hops. Sure enough, the vibrations caused the hop pellets to drop out of the bucket, down the game and into the boiling beer. A few weeks later, the beer went on tap and this time … it was a hit. The continual hopping made it outrageously hoppy without being crushingly bitter.
While that original football game only lasted a few brews (the steam killed the electronics), much more sophisticated contraptions have taken over our continual hopping process, but the theory and execution are essentially unchanged.
Minute Series
The first beer created with our method of continual hopping was 90 Minute Imperial IPA. Continually hopped for a full, you guessed it, 90 minutes, it’s abundantly hoppy and compelling complex. Inspired by the continual hopping process invented with 90 Minute, soon came 60 Minute which builds on the original process and flavor. From there, siblings 75 Minute and 120 Minute have come into the picture, and most recently … our new 30 Minute Light IPA! Each is continually hopped for its respective number of minutes and each perfectly balanced in its own right.
30 Minute is the new and improved recipe for our beloved Slightly Mighty. It’s still low in calories and carbs, but 30 Minute is now continually hopped for 30 minutes to create a more aromatic, less bitter and easy-drinking light IPA.
95 calories, 3.6g carbs, 1g protein and 0g fat per 12oz serving
Continually hopped for 60 minutes for an enticing and magnificent hop-centric experience. It’s fantastically hoppy and beautifully balanced.
Continually hopped for 75 minutes. Brewed with maple syrup and then dry-hopped once more with Cascade hops. It’s robustly hoppy and satisfyingly balanced.
Continually hopped throughout the entire boil and complemented by a powerful malt backbone for an intense, yet balanced hop flavor.
Continually hopped with a copious amount of high-alpha American hops throughout the boil and whirlpool, and then dry-hopped with a boatload of hops. Unfiltered and abundantly hoppy, it's the Holy Grail for hopheads.
