I went to a meeting of a new club in my area last night, and one of the guys there was explaining that he reuses his dry hops as a bittering charge in the boil. His thinking here is that there is no isomerization of alpha acids during dry hopping, so they’d be ok to use again in this way.
If this works it’s certainly a way to economize on hop usage. Anyone done this?
HAven’t done it myself, but I do recall some of the pros doing it during the hop crisis and reporting about a 30% drop in efficiency
Your friend must be very frugal.
Drew is right, this was talked about during the hop shortage. Some homebrewers were doing it. You do need to go right from the dry hops to the boil, or freeze, otherwise they will start to go funky. Too much mess to bother with.
I think he was advocating pulling them out and dropping them straight into the next batch. It does sound like it might be a bit more effort than its worth, unless you’re desperate to save money. On a large scale the savings could be quite significant I would imagine, but it might not really be that big a deal on the homebrew level unless you’re dry hopping with huge quantities.