Quick update. Managed to get about 1.25 gallons into the fermenter. My “whirlpool” consisted of pressing the hops down with a lid from a small pot to squeeze out some “wort”, then quickly folding some hops over a few times before it all got reabsorbed. Repeat every 5-10 minutes for an hour.
After an hour or so of what I guess you could call a hop stand, I scooped out just under half of the slightly damp hops into my BIAB bag in a colander over another large pot. I twisted and squeezed the crap out of the bag to get as much juice out as possible. I added the juice back to my kettle and the wort was now the consistency of drained, cooked spinach. I repeated the process one more time. Now the kettle was the consistency of my normal “hop the crap out of it IPA”.
I brought the kettle back up to 190ish for a few minutes just to make sure any bugs I may have picked up in the multiple squeezings got pasteurized. Then I chilled, and dumped the whole thing into a bucket lined with my sanitized BIAB bag. I squeezed every last drop out of the bag, aerated and pitched about 1/4 pack of US-05. The trash bag full of nothing but squeezed hops was about the size of a 3-gallon better bottle. Can’t wait for this one.