Hello brewers, I have an opportunity to acquire all the fresh hops I care to pick. It’s a farm here in Northern California and the varieties are all Northwest American. The farm hasn’t done AA analysis so that is a guess but doesn’t bother me too much.
From reading I’ve done around the web it looks like a good ratio for converting a wet hop usage from dry hops is 4:1. If anyone can confirm or comment please do so.
My primary question is regarding beer style. The only harvest Ale style I have ever had is American Pale Ale. I am wondering if there is a reason for this. I can easilly do an IPA or Imperial IPA but is there somethng about fresh hops that would make that a bad idea?
One thing I’d recommend is if you don’t know the AA% of the hops, then you might want to keep the wet hops for your late additions and use hops with known AA values for your bittering addition.
At the NHC, Jammie Floyd of Ninkasi recommended using a high alpha bittering hop for the bittering addition and using the wet hops for later additions (here I am using wet as off the bine, some say fresh).
The ratio should be closer to 5 on the wet vs dry.
Hops are dried to 8 to 10% moisture. Use 10 as the math is easy. So those are 10% water 90% vegetable material.
Off the bine the hops are 80% water and 20% vegetable material. Since we are interested in the properties from the hop content not the water content, 90/20=4.5 times as much of the wet hops.
Edit - some say to round up to 5, or even use 6 times as you are really after the hop qualities in the beer.
Sorry to kick up a dead thread, but I’ve ordered a pound of fresh Citra that should show up sometime this month. I was thinking of throwing some in a batch of a sour beer I have in secondary now (something like a Flanders blonde). Would using the whole pound as a dry hop be crazy? I was planning on using 2oz of dry hops.
The APA is well suited because it showcases hops like no other beer. You can do another style like an amber or a bitter but if you bump up the hops it’ll turn it into an APA.
So I ended up using half the hops in a basic tripel, and the other half in the pale sour. They lost some weight overnight, so I ended up with 200g in each.
The beers are fantastic. Insane, huge hop punch. A good showcase for the hops, but I think next time I’ll use more like 1/3 or 1/4 of a pound for a batch. A 5-6:1 ratio seems really high. I’d say using 8oz fresh hops was comparable to using 4oz of dry hops, so more like a 2:1 ratio.
I know they had a lot more water weight, but I guess the volatile oils you lose during kilning made the hops pack more of a punch.
I used 2 pounds of Cascade (8.4 AA here in Colorado) for 10 gallons of beer. I used an IPA base and used Columbus pellet hops for bittering. I put the fresh hops in the sparge water, in the mash, first wort hops, and then huge knock-out addition. I then split the batch into 2 fermentations - using American Ale yeast in one and Saison yeast :o in the other. The Fresh Hop IPA is kegged and tasting pretty good but the Fresh Hop Saison is still in the secondary and tastes amazing.