If you’re going to use certain hops, you’ve got to learn what they’re going to produce. It’s easy as a homebrewer or pro brewer to get sucked into a description, but you really have to find out for yourself through sensory analysis, through rubbing, through tasting beers that use that hop.
The safest way for us to really get to know a hop is to pair it with things we know that work. We know what Citra brings to a beer at 7.5 percent versus 5.75 percent; we know what Mosaic, Vic’s Secret, Galaxy, Simcoe, and Cascade do. So when we add hops we’ve never used before and get that new angle to something, then we taste that beer and can ask, “Alright, what if we paired it with this?”
We’ll use a hop like Motueka and read that it has a 0.8 oil content, and we want to pair it with Citra which has a range of 1.8 to 2.5, so we start to take into consideration that if we want to dry hop with 2.5 to 3 pounds per barrel, we need to consider the hops we’re using and what their oil contents are.