Does hop extract require a long boil time to extract bittering? I am building a light bodied IPA with a target boil time of 30 minutes. The plan is to add hop extract at the beginning of the boil.
Is 30 minutes sufficient for bittering? Will 30 minutes produce the same bittering level as 60 or 90 minutes?
I normally do a 60 minute boil with a long flameout cool down period. With a 6 gallon batch, the wort sits for at least an hour in the kettle with steeping hops thrown it @ 180 F.
The hot wort rest period should continue to extract bitterness, correct?
I’m not sure I follow…why would you need to extract bitterness from hop extract? Isn,t that the purpose of extract? If it’s isomerized, you don’t need to boil at all to get bitterness. If it’s not, contact with hot wort should isomerize it almost instantly, shouldn’t it?
CO2 extract (hopshot/resin) is not isomorized. Why would it be different than pellets? They fall apart near instantly and the glands and resin are freely available.
Most of the extract targeted towards homebrewers is Hop Shot or similar and needs to be boiled to isomerize the same as any hop addition. It doesn’t isomerize instantly because it needs more than just heat - it needs to be in solution. And the stuff takes forever to dissolve. Even after a full 60-minute boil and extended hop stand there are still a lot of globules of extract floating around in the wort undissolved.
I did come up with a trick that seems to help the last time I used hop extract. I mixed it in with some DME to make a paste before adding it in. My plan was to increase the surface area of the extract to help it disperse/dissolve more easily. I still have some tweaks to do to improve the process, but I do feel that it made a significant improvement - there were a lot fewer globules left in the wort and the ones that remained were a lot smaller than usual.
Last time I didn’t use enough DME and the extract started to dissolve it. I think you want to get to a play-doh like consistency, where the extract is just mixed in with the DME as a dispersion.
I helped beta test Hop Shots years ago, so I’m very familiar with them. But if homebrewers aren’t finding isomerized extract, they aren’t looking. A quick Google produced at least 5 easily available sources, including Morebeer.
The ones I’ve seen have had a limited shelf life (2-3 months) and cost more for a small bottle than it costs for me to brew a whole batch of beer. If someone had a shelf-stable product at a reasonable price point (like Hop Shot), then I’d certainly try it out. That’s probably why MoreBeer has discontinued carrying Isohop extract.
My thoughts too, Eric. I’m not paying that especially given the short shelf life. I’m happy to bitter with Columbus pellets (or whatever). I’m more interested in some of the steam distilled dry hop oils that are slowly popping up.
The only time I have used hop extract were at annual Club brews at a local brewery, where we wanted easy and identical batches to compare single hop flavoring/late hop/whirlpool and dry hop additions which differed from brewer to brewer as the “only” variable (using the brewery’s wort and house yeast by all of us). Different fermenting temperatures may have occurred, but it was in the spring, so we were all fermenting in our basements at reasonably similar temperatures. It was really interesting to compare the hops this way. I don’t think I would use up a syringe of the hop extract we had before it would expire in terms of best use date.
By the way, the consensus favorite hop for flavor for our APA was Southern Cross (Mittlefruh and a couple other similar hops were up there, though).
Tried Eric’s trick today. Mixed the hop shot with DME. Maybe 1/8 cup DME to 5ml of hop shot. Final product looked like saw dust. Still sat on top of the break for a bit, but did manage to get into the wort and didn’t leave everything tacky. I’ll weigh it out tomorrow and figure out the ideal ratio.
I draw hot wort off the kettle into a Pyrex measuring cup and inject the hop shot into the near-boiling wort. Drawing the wort into the syringe a few times cleans it out pretty well. The measuring cup is dumped into the kettle - done.