Can anyone with personal experience using the Hop Tea method, please provide some guidance/feedback on this practice for adding hop aroma to beer. (Could I request that we keep on topic and skip all the other valid techniques of infusing hop aroma into beer such as dry-hopping, "hop-backs", "in-line hopping between keg & tap", etc.). I'm wanting to find out specifically about the technique of steeping hops in warm/hot water then adding the resulting hop tea back into the fermenter typically after primary fermentation or during the diacetyl rest.
I'll jump-start the thread by sharing my only experiment with this. A few months ago I discovered that one of my pre-primed IPAs failed to carbonate due to a leaky poppet valve. Having already tasted this brew from a previous keg (and been underwhelmed by the lack of aroma despite significant dry-hopping), I decided to try to improve things by adding in hop tea aromatics at this very late stage. Because the beer was not yet carbonated, one can really think of the corny as being almost the same as a secondary fermentation vessel. Anyway, I started by pouring a few cups of boiling water into my French-press coffee maker and, once cooled to around 170 F, tossed in 2 oz of Cascade pellets and let it steep for about 20-30 minutes. I then syphoned the filtered hop tea into the keg (after using the press-pot's excellent built-in filter), purged the top of the keg with CO2, and force-carbonated in the refrigerator. A taste-testing 2 weeks later revealed a far bigger cascade aromatic profile than I'd hoped for and no obvious off-flavors or oxygenation. I'm often surprised at just how difficult it is to get massive hop aroma through dry-hopping especially when the beer recipe calls for elevated residual crystal malts that resist hop absorption, yet this was so simple, so effective, yet used so little hops.
Can it really be this easy? Could this hop-tea technique (or preferably, an even better protocol than my simple first-time trial) really be a viable alternative to traditional dry-hopping? Some of the advantages that occur to me include: (1) aromatics will transfer from the hop flower to water (gravity 1.000) more easily than to wort/beer (typically 1.010 1.020); (2) hop aromatics also transfer to liquid more readily at 150 F than at refrigerated fermentation temps. The downsides might be (1) greater risks of late oxygenation, although a solid boil and other good beer-making practices should minimize this; (2) a degraded aromatic profile due to a brief exposure to hot water temps, rather than extended exposure to cool wort temps.
In my view, the risk of contamination should be no greater than, and possibly less than, dry hopping but minimal in either event. It also occurred to me that instead of steeping hops hot and quick, one could steep them in 65 F water for an extended time. But I dismissed this due to the elevated risk from contamination one could expect from steeping hops without the protection offered by alcohol, hops and CO2).
Apologies in advance if I missed a thread dealing with hop tea, but the only ones I found seemed to have something else as their primary focus or lacked specific details and techniques. Perhaps my trial run with hop tea was dumb luck and the disadvantages just did not show up. Does anyone know of a microbrewery using this technique? I found nothing in Palmer or the other usual sources, although I bet they're there.
Please share all before I wreck a perfectly good 12-gallon brew testing this a second time.
I'll jump-start the thread by sharing my only experiment with this. A few months ago I discovered that one of my pre-primed IPAs failed to carbonate due to a leaky poppet valve. Having already tasted this brew from a previous keg (and been underwhelmed by the lack of aroma despite significant dry-hopping), I decided to try to improve things by adding in hop tea aromatics at this very late stage. Because the beer was not yet carbonated, one can really think of the corny as being almost the same as a secondary fermentation vessel. Anyway, I started by pouring a few cups of boiling water into my French-press coffee maker and, once cooled to around 170 F, tossed in 2 oz of Cascade pellets and let it steep for about 20-30 minutes. I then syphoned the filtered hop tea into the keg (after using the press-pot's excellent built-in filter), purged the top of the keg with CO2, and force-carbonated in the refrigerator. A taste-testing 2 weeks later revealed a far bigger cascade aromatic profile than I'd hoped for and no obvious off-flavors or oxygenation. I'm often surprised at just how difficult it is to get massive hop aroma through dry-hopping especially when the beer recipe calls for elevated residual crystal malts that resist hop absorption, yet this was so simple, so effective, yet used so little hops.
Can it really be this easy? Could this hop-tea technique (or preferably, an even better protocol than my simple first-time trial) really be a viable alternative to traditional dry-hopping? Some of the advantages that occur to me include: (1) aromatics will transfer from the hop flower to water (gravity 1.000) more easily than to wort/beer (typically 1.010 1.020); (2) hop aromatics also transfer to liquid more readily at 150 F than at refrigerated fermentation temps. The downsides might be (1) greater risks of late oxygenation, although a solid boil and other good beer-making practices should minimize this; (2) a degraded aromatic profile due to a brief exposure to hot water temps, rather than extended exposure to cool wort temps.
In my view, the risk of contamination should be no greater than, and possibly less than, dry hopping but minimal in either event. It also occurred to me that instead of steeping hops hot and quick, one could steep them in 65 F water for an extended time. But I dismissed this due to the elevated risk from contamination one could expect from steeping hops without the protection offered by alcohol, hops and CO2).
Apologies in advance if I missed a thread dealing with hop tea, but the only ones I found seemed to have something else as their primary focus or lacked specific details and techniques. Perhaps my trial run with hop tea was dumb luck and the disadvantages just did not show up. Does anyone know of a microbrewery using this technique? I found nothing in Palmer or the other usual sources, although I bet they're there.
Please share all before I wreck a perfectly good 12-gallon brew testing this a second time.