Liquid Nitrogen Pure Hop # IPA

Hi all - thought you might be interested in a new technique we've been playing with lately. We've been brewing with pure lupulin, extracted from whole cone Nelson Sauvin with liquid nitrogen in a hop hash making process. The beer was hopped exclusively with the pure lupulin throughout the boil, and then dry #'d has well.

Initial results are promising - seems to give the beer a delicate aroma and very smooth bitterness.

Here's a homage video we made on the process

 

So far we've really up'ed the amount of leaf we would use for a comparable beer brewed with pellets just to see the effect, and made additions all the way through the boil. For those trials, it's not cost effective (and takes a lot of time!), but shows enough promise that we're working on ways to make the extraction faster, and used in smaller amounts as flame out additions.

We've only used used hop extract once, and it's not a great beer to compare it with (it was a 100% extract beer - all malt, all hop extract). Using the # certainly free's up more space in the kettle and at a guess, compared to say CO2 extract would have more aroma impact and be more delicate in general (note - that is at a guess!!).

 

Hop extracts are almost all supercritical CO2 extracts and come as a goopey oil, so a solvent has been used to make the extraction under pressure and you might get some plant matter or pigment coming through. I guess the main difference is that no solvents have been used, it's refined through mesh filters to collect the pure lupulin and done on site, at time of the brew.