Am I thinking they are crazy, or am I missing something? (HOPS QUESTION)

I picked up 9 lbs of Cascade hops in the Moxee Valley. Due to their sloppy harvesting , it falls off the trucks constantly and i was there to grab vines before anyone ran them over!  I also found some wild growing near the farms, in ditches but can tell by identification  methods most likely also Cascade as the Moxee area typically grows only 3 varieties and the others didnt look at all like this.

Anyhoo… I offered to send to my brother for his friend. He said 9 lbs of fresh hops  (this is wetter, only dried overnight, as I didn’t want to ship totally wet, with no cold storage available)  is enough for TWO 5 gallon batches.

TWO??? I looked up the hoppiest recipes and NONE ever come close to maybe 16 oz tops of hops for 5 gal brews, but 4.5 lbs???  its roughly a 4.5 to 7 ibus from what I read.  Is this person crazy?

Generally, a pound of cones with no vines would dry out to about 3-4 ounces.

9 lbs fresh hops is the equivalent of roughly 2 pounds of dried hops. I guess that will be alright if he wants to try to stretch that out to 2 batches. FWIW, I use 17 ounces in 3 gallons of IPA, but I admit I have a bit of a hop problem.

Well these dried overnight, so I would not consider them totally fresh fully wet hops. But I understand what you are saying.

I have often thought of gleaning hops after the harvesters have gone through a field, but you beat me to it.  I will correct you on one point though - there are a lot of varieties grown in the Moxee area, including several experimental varieties.  When I have considered gleaning, I thought I would ask permission followed by asking which varieties were in which area so I would know what I would have.

It would be so cool to have someone glean while the grain is in the mash tun.  Those volatile oils would have no time to evaporate!  A wet hop Citra/Amarillo APA/AIPA would be delicious!

I have never used the equivalent of 14 oz dried in a batch before.  That’s quite a bit.  Seems you’d have a huge volume loss from that.  But whatever suits your fancy I guess.

FWIW, I like to use ~ a lb (sometimes more) in 5 gallons of AIPA. The loss in 5 gallons is not extensive.

From what I understand its about 5x the amount of wet hops for what you’d use dry or pellet? Any who, I too use close to a pound in some IPAs and if you account for the additional loss you still package what you desire

The number for wet to commercially dried comes out to 4.6 time wet to dry.