Homebrewing Blog and Resource

The hobby of homebrewing beer

Passion Fruit Flavor in Hops

This weekend, the plan is to get some of the one gallon, SMaSH hop explorations underway. These are the hawt new varieties that we have wanted to learn more about and brewing up small batches is a low-risk way to get that knowledge. If I were to brew five gallon batches and I don’t like the hop, I may be in the position of being stuck with a lot of beer I don’t want to drink. The one gallon batch presents a small yield of beer that may not be enjoyable and also keeps the costs low.

The hot hops that I am going to brew with are:

I also have a Down Under IPA on the calendar too. This recipe has a large amount of AU and NZ hops in them. One of the descriptors about the flavor and aroma of these hops that kept coming up was passion fruit.

I first saw it in the description of Simcoe hops. Back then, I was ignorant of what the fruit tasted like. I think I had it in some juice at some point but it was mixed with other flavors.

The Pursuit of Training Your Taste Buds

Beyond training to be a beer judge, it’s good to know what things taste like that are being used to describe beer flavors. Keeping a mind that is open to learn and is always in the pursuit of gaining knowledge led me to buy a passion fruit at the grocery store.

When I brought it home, I had to look online how to eat it. From what I found, I learn that it’s all about scooping the pulp out of the skin and slurping it up.

Here’s some photos of the first tasting:

Split open passion fruit

Passion Fruit

Scooped passion fruit

The fruit is easy to cut open and the pulp was easy to spoon out. A few tastes and I got a good understanding of the flavors. The fruit is pretty tart, it’s got the lemon taste without the lemon scent. There are some notes of melon in there, mostly in the aroma. If you were to take a mild honeydew aroma and match it with some tart lemon flavors, you would have a passion fruit. I can see how this fruit would be used as a way to describe how a hop would smell and taste. It has a very bright tartness that if there is no citrus elements in the finished beer’s hop profile, then you would use passion fruit to describe it.

Let me see if I can commit this flavor to memory and pull it out later when I am tasting beer.

Brew on!

Previous

Acetaldehyde Off Flavor Tasting In Home Brewed Beer

Next

BIAB Series – Mosaic SMaSH Ale

1 Comment

  1. Chad R

    Excited to see more beers with Mosaic hops line up on shelves. I’ve never had a passion fruit, but it sounds like some good new flavor profiles for IPAs. Would love to see some hop varieties be tinged with starfruit, a recent (amazing) discover at the grocery.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén