Hop Dryer Plans?

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t-bag

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Hey there,
T-bag here. So ive got a plan for a hop dryer but was wondering if there was a better way. at harvest time it'll still be pretty damn hot out round 80-90 degrees so i was just going to make frames out of thin wod and staple some screen to it and stack about 8 frames on top of each other, set them out in the car port and put a box fan in front of it. Im up for suggestions or pics/plans of anyone elses hop dryers. thanks.
 
I do this but, add a bonnet style hair dryer (bonnet removed) and you'll get the internal temps up near 104 to 110 on the loew setting. With that, I dried a total of 4 pounds within 6 hours.

The hops were packages and in the freezer the day of harvest.

What you've suggested will likely work but it will take a long time. I am just not sure how effective a fan blowing against the box will be. You'd do better to push or pull the air through the hops.
 
MY approach is pretty low rent. I take my sliding screen door off my back patio door, and spread the hops out on it. I do the drying in my garage, which is a toasty 110F-120F during the late summer. Seems to do the trick, takes just about 24hrs to completely dry out.
 
Cheap air filters for furnaces/AC Units.

I propped up an aluminum ladder on each end, layed the filters in the middle. Put the hops on the filter and put a heater and fans underneath. Took about 3 days to dry.
 
I dry hops in paper bags or laundry baskets lined with newspaper. Turn the hops everyday until they are dry. Low tech, but it works fine.
 
MY approach is pretty low rent. I take my sliding screen door off my back patio door, and spread the hops out on it. I do the drying in my garage, which is a toasty 110F-120F during the late summer. Seems to do the trick, takes just about 24hrs to completely dry out.

I am just a first year grower but if I get any yield this year I have already planned on this approach or something similar. I have the remnants of a screen that my dog ran trough and will just frame it with some scrap wood. Then use a couple saw horses and lay it across with the hops spread out on top then put a box fan below to blow air up from the bottom. All of this while being in a 120* + garage in the summer.
 
I think you've got a good idea. ROT is to keep them out of direct sunlight when drying.
This is my cheap-n-easy way of drying. I have a 24" box fan behind the camera in this pic to keep air moving. The spare bedroom gets all the late-day sun and gets very warm.

http://i277.photobucket.com/albums/kk46/wapilotbrew/chinook08gf2.jpg

The "HopHammock" is made from a poures sheet used to keep weeds out of your flower/garden beds.
 
cool thanks for the ideas ill probably put the frames in the workshop which gets up to 115-120 and ill seperate them slightly.
 
I don't intend to hijack the thread, but another option is to not dry them at all. If you have a vacuum sealer, just stuff the hops in the vacuum bags and freeze the hops fresh. I did this last year and had fresh-frozen hops all year long. This system worked great. I got the idea from Vinnie Cilurzo from Russia River Brewing and Brian Hunt of Moonlight Brewing. Neither dried any of their hops, but kept them fresh or frozen.
IMHO, the flavor and aroma from fresh or fresh-frozen hops is superior to dried hops. I compared my hops side-by-side, fresh vs dried, utilized in dry-hopping and found the fresh hops more flavorful and aromatic.
Additionally, using a vacuum sealer is really easy and quick and the hops when vacuum-sealed are really compact.
 
I don't intend to hijack the thread, but another option is to not dry them at all. If you have a vacuum sealer, just stuff the hops in the vacuum bags and freeze the hops fresh. I did this last year and had fresh-frozen hops all year long. This system worked great. I got the idea from Vinnie Cilurzo from Russia River Brewing and Brian Hunt of Moonlight Brewing. Neither dried any of their hops, but kept them fresh or frozen.
IMHO, the flavor and aroma from fresh or fresh-frozen hops is superior to dried hops. I compared my hops side-by-side, fresh vs dried, utilized in dry-hopping and found the fresh hops more flavorful and aromatic.
Additionally, using a vacuum sealer is really easy and quick and the hops when vacuum-sealed are really compact.

Really? Is this true? I'm a first year grower and have the hops drying thing in the back of my mind until next year but I have a Vac Sealer and this would be increadibly easy!!

Not saying I dont believe you, calpyro, but has anyone else done this?
 
I don't know if other home brewers are vacuum sealing and freezing hops. If there is others out there, I suspect there aren't many.
I got the idea from Vinnie Cilurzo at Russian River Brewing. He told me that he froze his fresh hops to allow him to use them for dry-hopping his beers when making fresh hop beer. His hops are harvested once and could be used for the boil, but would be rotten when it was time to dry-hop, if not frozen.
I also talked to Brian Hunt from Moonlight Brewing. Brian has a pretty large hop field he maintains for his brewery. I have discussed hop growing with him and he does not dry any of his hops and he freezes all of them that he does not use fresh.
I suspect that hop growers dry hops, because that is the only practical way to store hops on a commercial basis, not because it preserves the flavor better.
In my limited experience, fresh hops taste and smell fresher. I don't want to lose that to drying. By vacuum sealing and freezing, the hops are compressed into a solid hop-mass, which freezes very nicely, preserves the fresh-flavor.
I have done side-by-side flavor comparisons of fresh vs dry hops and fresh came out on top. On a ten gallon batch, I split the dry-hops in half. I dry-hopped one keg with un-dried, fresh (frozen) hops and the other keg with the same hops that I dried. The results were pretty apparent. I found the beer dry-hopped with fresh hops fresher and much more aromatic. I let a couple of local professional brewers taste my these beers side-by-side and both independently favored the beer made with fresh hops, to the beer made with dried hops.
I am not sure you are going to find any information on freezing hops. I just did it and I like the results.
 
I like the idea of freezing them fresh, and it sounds like you have evidence to support "wet" hops contribute better flavor. Has any one else tried this?

If I'm lucky enough to get some first year hops, I am planning on using the Alton Brown jerky dryer: a few cheap cotton furnace filters stacked on top of a window box fan, and bungeed down.
 
Im pretty interested in the freezing idea (keeps dry hops from absorbing a lot of your beer.

Does this work for use in the boil as well? I see you only mention using it for dry hopping.
 
If I can lend my 2 cents, the whole idea of drying and/or freezing hops is to prevent oxidation. Oxidation will lead to loss of the alpha/beta acids (bittering agents) and the essential oils and other things that add the aromas and flavors that allow different varieties of hops make our beers taste different.

To stop the oxidation process, we have to remove the water activity. This can be done by drying the cone down to 8% to 15% moisture content (from ~80%), by freezing it to solidify the water or by both. Drying will work much better at stopping the oxidation and the material will last longer. Plus, removing all that water reduces storage space, weight and energy to freeze.

So why did calpyro’s wet-frozen hops taste better? Because drying can drive away a lot of those essential oils that you want to keep to flavor your beer, especially dry-hopped. When you are drying, the essential oils start to break down (evaporate) around 100 to 110F and the Alpha acids start degrading around 140-150F. Since boiling the hops in the wort drives off the essential oils, you don't need to worry as much about drying temperature with your high alpha bittering hops (magnums). But if you want to have some hops for dry hopping, dry them at as low of a temperature as possible. It will take longer, but you’ll preserve more flavor.

Once dried (or not), vacuum packaging is best. Even better is to add a cover gas to push out the oxygen and put it in a oxygen barrier bag. Many of the cheaper vacuum packers use plastic bags that don’t keep out oxygen. Then throw them in the freezer. That will keep them for up to a year.
 
.... snip ...
So why did calpyro’s wet-frozen hops taste better? Because drying can drive away a lot of those essential oils that you want to keep to flavor your beer, especially dry-hopped. When you are drying, the essential oils start to break down (evaporate) around 100 to 110F and the Alpha acids start degrading around 140-150F. Since boiling the hops in the wort drives off the essential oils, you don't need to worry as much about drying temperature with your high alpha bittering hops (magnums). But if you want to have some hops for dry hopping, dry them at as low of a temperature as possible. It will take longer, but you’ll preserve more flavor.
... snip ...

Interesting info, Dan. I air dry my hops in kraft paper bags at ambient summer temps (70 to 100 deg. F.). Turn them daily until they are dry - usually 4 to 7 days. Then they are vacuum packed in glass jars or plastic bags and frozen. These hops usually smell very much like fresh hops when I check them prior to adding them to the kettle or fermenter. I get good hop flavor and aroma when using these hops for dry hopping.
 
Fresh hops have a significantly different weight than dry hops. What is the adjustment that needs to be made to account for the weight difference when formulating a recipe with a fresh "wet" hop?
 
I have heard that there is around a 5:1 ratio of wet vs dry.
My hops have measured in around 2:1 when fully ripe. I use 2:1 and find it just about right.
I think that my homegrown hops that are picked at the peak of ripeness have more flavor, aroma and bitterness than commercially purchased hops. Using the 5:1 ratio, my beer was waaaaaaaay over hopped. Your results may vary.
 
The weight reduction for dried hops is around 5:1, assuming they are dried all the way down to 10%. Rybacek's "Hop Production" says the weight for 100 wet cones is around 1.6 to 2.6 oz and 100 dry cones drops to .35 to .06 oz. I’m not sure how you would factor that into a brewing recipe, though. Nearly all of that weight loss would be water, not alpha acids.

Calpyro, your homegrown hops should have more flavor & aroma based on how you dry them. Many of the commercially purchased, pelletized hops were dried at temperatures around 140F. They use these high temps because it is more economical. Drying at lower temps would take them too long.

desertbronze, try laying them out on an old screen window like many of the other guys suggested. They will dry faster without any ill effects. Air passing over the hops is what carries away the moisture. Putting them in a bag slows that process down. You can point a fan at them, but unless it’s strong enough to force air through the bed of hops, it’s only helping to dry the top (or bottom) of the pile.
 
The weight reduction for dried hops is around 5:1, assuming they are dried all the way down to 10%. Rybacek's "Hop Production" says the weight for 100 wet cones is around 1.6 to 2.6 oz and 100 dry cones drops to .35 to .06 oz. I’m not sure how you would factor that into a brewing recipe, though. Nearly all of that weight loss would be water, not alpha acids.

So I'd need at least 300 dry cones for 1 oz? That doesn't sound right. Are you sure you don't mean lbs?
 
There's a guy in my club who uses a stack of furnace filters bungee corded to a box fan to dry his hops. IIRC it takes him several days to dry his hops.

I've considered using my press (standing w/ big hydraulic cylinder) to "pelletize" hops. This would involve grinding them up and squeezing the water out of the pulp. I think a couple of machined aluminum plates would do the trick.

It seems to me that the primary drawback of fresh or frozen hops is the variation in moisture content. That will probably vary significantly from plant to plant and year to year.
It would be interesting to examine three brews: fresh hopped, slow (low temp) dried hops hopped and commercially dried hops hopped. Maybe I'll do that if I get a significant harvest this year.
 
There's a guy in my club who uses a stack of furnace filters bungee corded to a box fan to dry his hops. IIRC it takes him several days to dry his hops.
What is he doing to force the air through the filters?

Air is very lazy. It takes the path of least resistance...the path with the lowest pressure drop. If you want the air from a box fan to go through several furnace filters, you would need to do something to force it to do so, like wrap the whole thing in shrink wrap to force the air through the filters.

Otherwise, the air will probably leak out the sides or the box fan may not have enough force to get the air through to begin with. If the air isn't blowing through, it would take several days to dry since there is almost no air movement over the hops.
 
I've considered using my press (standing w/ big hydraulic cylinder) to "pelletize" hops. This would involve grinding them up and squeezing the water out of the pulp. I think a couple of machined aluminum plates would do the trick.
Pelletizing is another whole animal. Why do we pelletize? We mill the dried up from cone form to a powder form for two reasons:

1.) less space for storage

2.) Less mess in the brew kettle. It all settles out instead of having cones plugging everything up.

The pellets do a great job of slowly breaking down into the powder.

So why not just add it in the form of a powder? The lulpulin (sticky resin that holds the alpha acids) hates water and will keep the powder from mixing without agitation. (Think hot chocolate mix. It clumps together, falls to the bottom and remains dry.) In pellet form, the water can slowly leach in and pull it apart.

For the pelletizing process, the hops should be dried. The problem with pelletizing is that whenever you compress something, it heats up. If you heat the pellet too high during this process, you can damage all the good stuff again. So pelletizing is not desirable from the product quality standpoint.

If you as a homebrewer really have storage issues, I would recommend drying and then grinding the hops up. Store them and use them in a powder form, realizing that you may have to slowly sprinkle it in and stir vigorously to mix it up.
 
Great info GVH, thanks for the input.
Its my first year growing hops. I think I will use my dehydrators I have if I get any.
I currently don't use whole hops but use pellets. So next I will find someone to give them to.
 
The weight reduction for dried hops is around 5:1, assuming they are dried all the way down to 10%. Rybacek's "Hop Production" says the weight for 100 wet cones is around 1.6 to 2.6 oz and 100 dry cones drops to .35 to .06 oz. I’m not sure how you would factor that into a brewing recipe, though. Nearly all of that weight loss would be water, not alpha acids.

Calpyro, your homegrown hops should have more flavor & aroma based on how you dry them. Many of the commercially purchased, pelletized hops were dried at temperatures around 140F. They use these high temps because it is more economical. Drying at lower temps would take them too long.

desertbronze, try laying them out on an old screen window like many of the other guys suggested. They will dry faster without any ill effects. Air passing over the hops is what carries away the moisture. Putting them in a bag slows that process down. You can point a fan at them, but unless it’s strong enough to force air through the bed of hops, it’s only helping to dry the top (or bottom) of the pile.

Dan,
I started using the 5:1 ratio and found the beers were over hopped, so I ended up weighing my hops wet vs dry. That is how I found that my hops were 2:1, wet vs dry.
I only add my experience so others will evaluate their own hops. If hops are hand picked at the peak of ripeness, I think that they may be more ripe, thus drier.
If a person harvest an entire plant, like the commercial growers do, there will be some hops that are ripe and some that are not fully ripe. That may be some of the difference in hop moisture.
 
There's a guy in my club who uses a stack of furnace filters bungee corded to a box fan to dry his hops. IIRC it takes him several days to dry his hops.

I've considered using my press (standing w/ big hydraulic cylinder) to "pelletize" hops. This would involve grinding them up and squeezing the water out of the pulp. I think a couple of machined aluminum plates would do the trick.

It seems to me that the primary drawback of fresh or frozen hops is the variation in moisture content. That will probably vary significantly from plant to plant and year to year.
It would be interesting to examine three brews: fresh hopped, slow (low temp) dried hops hopped and commercially dried hops hopped. Maybe I'll do that if I get a significant harvest this year.

The variation in moisture of wet hops is not too big of a deal. Just come up with the moisture content of your hops. Weigh a pound of your first hops wet and then dry them. Compare the to weights and there you go. That's what I did and I have found it pretty accurate.
 
IIRC, another merit to drying is the process helps drive off some of the properties involved with photosynthesis, when is what lend the grassiness associated with wet hopping of some varieties..

I do like me some wet hop beers but, not all hops are created equal for this so, make sure you keep really good notes of your tastings.
 
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