How should I use my fresh hops?

NUGGET NECTAR! You'll use those for a dry hop addition.

 

When you peel them open do you get that wonderful hop smell, or freshly mowed lawn aromas? If they don't have a strong hop smell and visible lupulin inside I wouldn't use them. First year hops (at least my first year hops were) can be underdeveloped in lupulin and give your beer a grassy taste. Regardless they should really improve in both yield and flavor over the next couple of seasons.

 

My first year cascade smelt fantastic and covered my fingers in sticky lupilin and hop oils. Only got around 4 ounces dry, but the plant is a champ.

 

I'm jealous, it really took 3 years before mine were usable.

 

I am not a wet hop expert; I brewed my first Harvest Ale using wet hops just 2 days ago.

Firstly, rocdoc1 has an excellent point: check whether your hops are ‘good’. I did not know that hop quality varies from year 1 to year 2 and so on.

My homegrown hops were Nugget Hops (third year for the plant). My harvest was just over 12+ ounces of mature hops (there are still lots of hop cones on the plant but they are still immature).

For my Harvest Ale I added the wet hops as late hops:

· 4.5 ounces for the last 15 minutes of boil

· 8+ ounces for end of boil (and a 25 minute hop stand)

I used 0.5 ounces of Warrior pellet hops for the bittering addition.

My suggestion to the OP (assuming that the hops pass the quality test) is to just make two hop additions. Use your favorite bittering hops for the first addition) and then use the 6 ounces of wet hops for the end of boil (and hop stand).

Oh, and be prepared for a lot of wort loss to the wet hops. I underestimated how much I would lose for my Harvest Ale. I was shooting for an OG of 1.050 but ended up with 1.043 instead.

Good luck with your Harvest Ale!

Cheers!

 

Jack, why do whole hops absorb more wort than pelletized hops? And I would think that fresh hops that are essentially full of moisture would be able to absorb even less. There should be the same amount of plant material in an ounce of pellet or whole hops.

 

Corky, the ‘real’ problem is the amount of hops. I used over a pound of wet hops to make my Harvest Ale. And those 1 lb. of hops removed a lot of wort despite them being 'wet'.

As to: “There should be the same amount of plant material in an ounce of pellet or whole hops.” This may be true for dry hops: I ounce of pellet hops may equal 1 ounce of dried whole hops. I suspect that you really lose more wort to dried whole hops vs. pellet hops but I really don’t have any specifics to back up my suspicion on this particular matter.

Cheers!

Jack

 

I understand about the wet hops, but I've never used a significant amount of wet hops before. I've only used whole hops a couple of times, do you wring them out or otherwise try to get the wort out?

 

“do you wring them out or otherwise try to get the wort out?” That is something worth considering. I personally did not conduct a wringing out process. For the flavor hops addition I used two muslin bags to contain the 4.5 ounce of hops. I just lifted them out of the pot at the end of boil and let them ‘drip dry’. For the aroma hops (8+ ounces) I used a grain bag and at the end of the hop stand I lifted it out and help it for 2-3 minutes to let it ‘drip dry’ as well.

I purposefully added more malt to this batch to ‘account’ for wort loss but I underestimated how much I would lose. Next time (presuming I make another Harvest Ale) I will add more malt upfront to properly account for this loss.

Cheers!

 

I brewed an ESB a couple of months ago and threw about 3 ozs of very fresh Cascades into the kettle at flameout, whether they contributed anything or not I'll never know. But it gave me immense satisfaction to actually use my hops after 8 years of growing them in the worst drought we've ever had. Last summer the bines never even got a foot tall so I was really surprised to see them come up this year.

 

Wet (which I haven't measured) aside, I have measured more absorption with leaf hops than with pellets. Although technically, absorption might not be the right word. 'Obstruction' might be better. I think the reason I lose more wort to leaf hops than to pellets is that leaf hops have more pockets to hold wort. So it's not so much that they actually absorb more, but that they keep more wort from getting out of the kettle trub. All bets are off if you squeeze.

 

Best of luck on your beer and please report back on how it turned out.

Cheers!

 

Try them dry also, sometimes the fresh vegetation smell overpowers the lupulin.

 

I planted my first rhizomes kinda late this year and there's only a few cones, mine are Nugget too! I love me some Nugget!