Like many others, I received an Instant Pot recently. Of course, my imagination turned toward “How can I use this in homebrewing?”.
In a nutshell, the instant pot is an electric pressure cooker. It has a lid that seals at the start of a boil, and then you can cook something under pressure, which raises the temperature and hastens the time to cook your pot roast.
What about hops? It seems to me that putting a couple ounces of hops in an instant pot with a cup or two of water and cooking it under pressure could produce some interesting results. Since the cooking occurs in a sealed unit, I wonder if maybe, just maybe, some of the aromatics that we normally boil off might be retained and reabsorbed into the tea? My guess is that it would also extract bitterness more quickly and completely than a typical boil.
I’m looking forward to doing some experimentation, but I wondered if anyone here has tried this or something similar?
Here is an article about the I’m also curious about the quality of the bitterness, flavor and aroma. Will it add a vegetal flavor - particularly if I let it go too long? Will it preserve or degrade taste and aroma? I’m not much of an experimenter, but I might have to split a simple batch into a bunch of growlers and do some comparison brewing.on brewing.