I brewed a Munich Helles yesterday and it included 2oz of tettnang for the hop bill. After I got the 1 oz packages out of my freezer one bag seemed less full than the other. After opening one it had the 1 oz as advertised, but my other pack only had .45 oz of pellets in it!!! I modified my hopping to get the 20 ibu I was shooting for but anyone else ever been shorted by hop union?? *note*. This was my 12th batch and first time this has happened so I'm assuming this is a very rare occurrence.
Nope I haven't and I always weigh mine out using a digital scale that is very accurate. Interesting it was that far off....
Sounds like a fluke. While my hop shipments have never been dead on accurate, the advantage has always been mine. But the 'error' has never been as high as 25%! If they were trying to pad profits, they'd more likely short everybody 5% or even 10% -- most people wouldn't bother weighing pre-packaged '1 oz' bags. 25% is a bit too blatant for it to have been intentional, IMO. I'd raise that issue with the seller and let it filter up the chain from there.
Yea I imagine this was just a fluke as I could tell that the package was gonna be short without opening it. I have a digital scale and rarely check my hop packages but it was obvious that this one was way off.
I've been shorted by my LHBS before. Not anything drastic, but I've had supposedly "1 ounce" bags of hops weigh in at like 25 grams. It's debatable how much of a difference that might make, but I highly recommend weighing all hop additions on your own scale, and keeping some extra around just in case you get shorted. It's a drag to spend all this time and energy putting together a recipe and trying to nail your process down to the last gravity point and IBU, only to find the guy at the shop wasn't paying attention when he weighed your stuff.
My LHBS now weighs each bag of hops from Hop Union for this exact reason. I'm glad they are looking out for me, because so far, I blindly trusted that a 1oz bag held 1oz.
That's very nice !! I also weigh hops out on my scale before putting them into the boil and almost all my hop union packs always have 1-1.1 oz of hops and I've never seen them below 1oz but this pack with .45oz was a bit crazy!!!!! I'm very glad this was a Helles and not an IPA
If there is an issue with hops union's weights, and they caught wind of a thread like this, I think it would get their attention, since forums like this have a high concentration of potential customers. I highly doubt there's anything underhanded going on, but if they have an issue with quality control* they need to know about it so they can fix it. I suggest writing to the company and politely explain what happened. I bet they will fix it. *which would include weight accuracy of finished products
"I blindly trusted that a 1oz bag held 1oz" Not ready to routinely weigh 1 oz bags myself...the # bags might be worth the effort though.
