Hello All

Have probably got about 20 or so BIAB brews under my belt, mostly from recipes I have found here and Greg Hughes book. I am not the most discerning drinker/brewer although so far I have stuck to fairly standard ales rather than lagers etc. At the moment I have a load of left over hops in my freezer that I am using up. Have been brewing a number of SMASH brews (from recipes I have found), this has been useful in that it has helped a bit in educating me in what the various hops taste like etc although they have been with fairly common hops like Northern Brewer and E K Goldings.   I am now thinking to design my own recipes, basically SMASH beers to use up my remaining, more uncommon, hops.

After that lot, now I come to my question, and its to do with the flavour of the beers hops. As I understand it the first addition of hops at the start of a boil is mostly for bitterness, and the later additions towards the end of the boil is to add flavour. So why do so many recipes have mid boil additions, why not just have the two additions, one at the start to add bitterness and one towards the end to add flavour, simples :-) I can see the economic advantage to a commercial brewer, but for an amateur, who is using small amounts, I would have thought it easier and more consistent to just have two. The best and only discussion I have found of hop flavouring is the “Basics of creating your own recipe” at the start of this thread. This says that flavour imparted by hops is related to weight, which is v useful, it gives an example but doesnt say anything about strength of flavour ie is it strongly flavoured, weakly flavoured or average? I suspect its average, but are there any formulas, rules of thumb or whatever on the weights of hops to be added to give strong, weak etc flavours to beer, without getting into text book calculations?

I dont suppose there are any exact answers to these questions but surely there must be something that more experienced brewers go by. I am trying to avoid reading a load of text books with complicated explanations. I shall be experimenting with the hops I have but am hoping for some sort of basics to start with. Appreciate any answers or links to places where answers may be found

Best Wishes - JoMay

Thanks for that Goulaigan,   I dont have that much of a palette either.   You seem to be doing what I was thinking about regarding number of additions.   re the quantities of hops, am assuming the IPA was a bit of a special, but depending on the beer style being brewed 2 oz of hops seems about what a lot of recipes call for, the difference being they tend to put it in, in several additions.   Should be a good starting point, thanks again  -  Jomay 

Thanks to you both,
Strangely, without any though I seem to have defaulted to the 60-15-0mins in hop additions.  My last two brews, which have been to my own recipes have been to those times, they are easy to do and calc.  I only use BIABicus, started with it when I started BIABing and it works well for me so have continued, although I dont bother with efficiencies, gravities and tech things like that, just an idea of bitterness and amounts of grain and hops do me  
Goul, I notice you tend to fairly large amounts of dry hopping.  I have not done much dry hopping in the past, recipes havnt called for it, and the ones that have, its only been probably about an once or so, which I have sprinkled on the top and swirled the fermentor around to wet the leaves.  My question is, with the quantities you are using, do you stir the leaves in and each day or so give them an extra stir.   It seems to me that something needs to be done to get the full effect from them  
Once again thanks for the replys  -  Jomay