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?
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.
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.
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