Brewing simple beers help us understand hops better. In this SMaSH review, we brew a beer with only one malt and one hop variety. This time around, we brew with a hop that has a couple of names and is used primarily for bittering. You may know it as Pahto Hops. You may know it as HBC 682 hops. Whichever name you see at your local store or online, use this video to get a sense of how this hop can be used in your next beer. Watch this video to see our tasting!

How We Approached This Beer

These beers are brewed to be as simple as possible. We use just one base malt for the fermentation. This malt is Rahr 2-row, which is a North American malt that is readily available to us and affordable. The batch size is small too, just one US gallon. Lastly, the yeast is US-05 that is a clean fermenting strain.

Since we are using this beer brewing method to examine hop varieties, it’s important to know the amounts and the schedule. For all of our 1 gallon SMaSH beers, we use 1 ounce or 28 grams of hops. Since this hop variety is a bittering hop, we changed up the hop schedule a bit. The Patho or HBC 682 hops are added at 60 minutes (7 grams) and 15 minutes in the boil (7 grams), and then again at flame out (14 grams). There is no dry hopping addition in this beer. After fermenting for 10 days and carbonating in a keg for 3, it is ready to be tasted and reviewed.

Our Pahto SMaSH Review

So, Pahto hops are a bittering hop and there is a reason why. There is no strong aroma component to this beer. Mike found some hints of woody aromatics on the nose. There are some cream notes too. Since we are evaluating the bittering properties of this hop, the flavor is our top focus. There is are earthy notes along with a pithy aftertaste. Brew with these hops in combination with Chinook, Simcoe, and/or Centennial hops. They will be an interesting change to your next West Coast IPA.

Hope you enjoyed our latest SMaSH review – BREW ON!