I love it when other homebrewers brew single hopped beers and post about their experiences. Commercial descriptions of hops are extremely helpful, but I’ve always found brewers direct experience with a hop extremely valuable in understanding how I might want utilize a variety or if I even want to at all. While it can be a tad bit boring to brew single hopped beers (and sometimes even more so to have 5 gallons on tap), it is by far one of the best ways for me to wrap my taste buds around a hop.

Dr. Rudi was released in 1977 by New Zealand’s Horticultural Research Centre and was once called the “Super Alpha,” despite having only a slightly above average alpha acid percentage (although this was 1977). Yakima Valley Hops describes the hop as tropical with notes of passion fruit, and peach. This description makes me think Citra and Galaxy! YCHHops describes Dr. Rudi as citrus, pine, and herbal. These are somewhat conflicting descriptors, almost sounding like they are describing two separate hops. I decided to run the oils of Dr. Rudi through a new experimental hop oils calculator I’ve been working on (image of results below). Essentially, the calculator works by entering in the known hop oils of any particular hop you are unfamiliar with and curious about trying (like Dr. Rudi) and it will calculate the hops that most closely resemble your chosen variety using hop oil data. I think this type of analysis could be useful to help formulate recipes with hops you haven’t yet brewed with. It might also be helpful when looking at new experimental varieties and trying to determine which ones you might want to order and experiment with. Hopefully I can put this calculator online soon, but for now I’m still working out the kinks. In this case, Dr. Rudi most closely resembles Tettnang, which is a far cry from the tropical, passion fruit, and peach aromas advertised by Yakima Valley Hops!

For this particular beer I decided to keep the grain build simple and used a New England IPA base to showcase Dr. Rudi. With both a healthy dose of whirlpool additions and two solid dry hop additions, including one in the keg until it kicked, there should be no trouble getting a nose on Dr. Rudi!

Experimental Hop Calculator Results