never took the hops out... did i ruin the beer???

Hello all-

First of all very good site lots of great info!! I appreciate the membership and and any help you can offer.

I'm new to this game and think i made a bit of a mistake. I tried to search the forum to get help to avoid overposting, but didn't find any results.

I made a golden palisade IPA kit from austin homebrew supply. Everything went fine, I seeped the grain bag added the hops at the proper time and cooled it quickly (put the pot in the creek behind my house, actually worked really well), then added the yeast.

Long story short, I followed all the directions but it didn't say in the directions to take the hops out of the wort before it went in the primary. I've been doing some reading and think that I should have taken them out. I left them in for like 2 weeks and most of it settled out, there's like a 3 inch green pile in the bottom of the carboy.

Please help me out, did I mess up? where do I go from here? dump it or bottle it?

The hops are palisade and yakima golding if that makes any difference

Thanks

You don't need to filter the hops out - once you siphon to your bottling bucket (if you are using any kind of filter) it will miss much of the leftover hops and other material. And, the spigot on the bottling bucket is intentionally higher than the bottom of the bottling bucket to ensure that the rest of the leftovers don't get into the bottles themselves. You are all good.

It will be just fine. You might have a bitterness profile that you weren't expecting. But since it's an IPA, no big deal. Whatever you do, DON'T dump it. Drink it up and enjoy.

The short answer is no.

The long answer is that while I might be worried about using a creek to cool the wort due to risk of infection or having your wort float away, there is nothing wrong with not removing the hops. If you don't want them going into the primary just put a strainer into your funnel as you are transferring to the carboy. I like the deeper basket type strainers since they can hold a lot of hops before clogging.

Agreed. Many of us have brewed many batches of beer by throwing the entire contents of our boil pot in the fermenter. No problem at all.

Bottoms up. No problem with it. For other styles, you may want to consider straining as you pour into the primary as was mentioned earlier about the hop profile.

No worries. I did the same thing with my first batch and it was drinkable. Do what the others have already said about leaving the hop layer behind in the primary, and using a strainer when siphoning into your secondary or bottling bucket.

lakeshorebrewer said:

Bottoms up. No problem with it. For other styles, you may want to consider straining as you pour into the primary as was mentioned earlier about the hop profile.

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I've never heard that before. How do boiled hops change the hop profile? I've never seen a reference to that.


I've always just dumped all of the contents of the brewkettle into the fermenter, for the most part.