This is really old, but a good question.

1. Malt and yeast choices would depend on what your goal for the beer is. Are you trying to highlight the hops for comparison, or are you trying to make the most interesting and dynamic beer possible from the most simple ingredient selections? If you're trying to compare hop profiles, you might not want to pick Vienna as your base malt and Saison yeast. That might make an interesting SMaSH overall, but you're going to lose sight of your hop comparison. For comparing just the hops you might want a clean slate with simple 2 row and American Ale yeast like the Chico strain.

2. I'm not sure about how to do it with homegrown hops without knowing AA%, but in general I would shoot for a style of beer or a 5 point range of IBU constraint so that all the beers are of similar bitterness. When I've done hop comparison beers of wildly different AA% I tend to use a sort of hop bursting technique and I leave all of the late additions exactly the same. The only place I vary the weight of a hop addition is the first addition and adjust it to get into my 5 point range for whatever kind of beer I'm making – usually an American Pale Ale.

I'd echo what LG has said really. Your going to struggle to hit any specific IBU with home grown hops as the AA% will be a shot in the dark. I'd perhaps use a bittering hop to hit IBU then use your home grown for late/dry hop additions. For malt/yeast I'd go for a Marris otter and perhaps SO4 or Notty these yeasts don't mess around and will speed things up for you.

I think Bob has more experience with home grown hops, I'm sure he will chip in with a solution.

Yeasty

Yeasty, good idea on using a second bittering hop and leaving the homegrowns for later.

Homegrown hops are best to be used as wet hops and just dumped into any single hop recipe. No cleaning necessary the bugs die in the process. (sorry, It is time for lunch and I have been testing beer for [put any reason here] and I can't think properly) You can filter the bugs out with a mustache or teeth?

I use all my home grown hops in one recipe each year. I pick a all Amarillo or something of that type and dump them all in. Half in the first 30 minutes of a 90 minute boil. The rest 10 minutes before flame out as late hops. The last two years the bugs won and I haven't brewed.

laserghost wrote:This is really old, but a good question.

I can't believe this thread went unanswered for almost three years

I thought we had always been good at no one being missed.

Goes to show that we need more active members even if only to say, "I think this question has been missed."

Emjay has not visited since about this time a year ago. A shame we failed on this and am amazed you even found this thread laserghost. Good on you .