First harvest pics and questions

I harvested my hops today and I have a few questions:
1)Should I clean them at all? How do I do that?
2) we have central air, is that good for drying them?
3) when will I know that they are completely dry?
4)should I just zip lock them and put them in the freezer when they are dry?
5)what's something else I forgot that I should know? Excited to brew these!

evanthes said:

I harvested my hops today and I have a few questions:
1)Should I clean them at all? How do I do that?
2) we have central air, is that good for drying them?
3) when will I know that they are completely dry?
4)should I just zip lock them and put them in the freezer when they are dry?
5)what's something else I forgot that I should know? Excited to brew these!

Click to expand...

1) No dont clean them you will wash the lupulin away which is the stuff you want. Your throwing them in a boil and or freezing them anyways so nothing will live.

2) Lay them out like you are, put a fan nearby though to get the most airflow possible across them and speed up the drying. Garages work great as they are typically pretty hot.

3) Weigh your hops wet, when t hey are dry and ready for packaging they will be around 20-30% of their original weight. For example i put out 5.7oz and came out with 1.7oz. Usually it will take 2-3 days, dependent on your areas relative humidity of course.

4) Ideally you want to vacuum seal them, a ziploc is fine if your planning on using them in the next few weeks but beyond that you really need to suck all of the air out some how or they lose a lot of their potency. There are tricks to getting a decent vacuum seal using a straw and two ziploc bags you can Google. Do this even at a MINIMUM, dont just throw them in a bag in the freezer.