hop leaf or pellet

squeeze em out and use the wort for starters (reboil) or add it to your batch (again reboil)

just saying.....

 

Or use hop sacks and squeeze em out into your batch w/o the re-boil.

 

I prefer leaf hops simply because they dont plug up my bazooka screen.

 

Interesting discussion. I think it's probably obvious you can make excellent beer with either pellets or whole hops, so I suppose this yet another one of those things that comes down to personal preference, what works best with your equipment, etc.

For whatever reason, I *like* to use whole hops when I can. I started experimenting with them after reading the Sierra Nevada uses nothing but whole hops, and some brewers, such as Mitch Steele at Stone, insist on whole hops for their late additions because of the supposedly superior aroma qualities. Giving it a try, I found hop absorption loss to be less of a problem than I expected. I find that with a little ingenuity (like a sanitized ball of steel wool on the end of my autosiphon) I can extract just about as much wort as would with pellets, which of course leave you with a certain nasty sludge that you can't get anything out of.

Now, is the beer any beer than what I could make using similar quality pellets? Hell if I know. And I do use pellets when I can't get what I want in whole hops. But if you curious about whole hops don't let the stories about absorption loss scare you too much.

 

Just what a new brewer needs.
More complexity and potential single-point failures.

 

That's the best part about this hobby, every step and ingredient have so much depth to them! You could build a simple recipe and change something every time like your water or yeast or dry hop or mash temp, and every time come up with something completely different from the original. It make me have a profound respect for breweries that can create the same exact beer over and over again and have it arrive at the same place each time. Plus there's so much more science involved in beer making, whereas hard liquor and wine are so simple to make.

 

Personally, I always use pellets for flavor & aroma additions. Hop extract for bittering. Leaf hops are great for keg hopping in a muslin bag if you want some super-saturated hop flavor and aroma.

 

On a vaguely related note, my LHBS has a sale on lbs of cascade for $10/lbs. I figure at this point they are a nearly a year old (based on my limited knowledge of hop growing season), would anyone hesitate to buy them based on age?

 

Well, not nearly a year old, but getting closer.

If sealed up, flushed, or vaccum packed, and stored properly in a freezer/fridge, I wouldn't see an issue I guess. Not a huge savings, but not bad, and if you like cascade, go with it.

 

mmm.. hop extract. I do love the stuff. My huge hoppy and bitter beers really benefit from that stuff for some reason.

 

How are they packaged and how has your LHBS been storing them? How fast would you use them? If they have been vacuum or nitrogen packed, and they have been kept frozen, I'd say go ahead an buy them, if you'll use them before the fall crop is here. But I wouldn't buy them just to save a couple dollars if they won't be used quickly.

 

They are in the hoptimus rex packages if you are familiar with them. The package says they are nitrogen flushed and light filtering, but it does not seem like they are vacuum packed. THe LHBS does keep them in a fridge, but I don't know how long they have had them, and how long their supplier did, etc.

 

Nitrogen flushed is just as good as vacuum packed, so no worries there. There is a difference in loss of alpha acids (bittering potential) and flavor/aroma oils between refrigerated hops and deep frozen hops though. Personally, I'd pass on old-ish refigerated hops, at least in bulk.