Loss of bitterness (hop loss) due to hot break?

Gents,

While I was brewing this weekend I noticed a lot of my hops were sticking to the side of my keggle due to the hot break that was created each time I added hops. In fact at one point I had a small boil over which left a significant amount of hop material on the top of the keggle edge.

My question is if this will actually affect the bitterness of the beer? Should I attempt to feed the hop residue back into the boil or is this material that can be ignored? I get the impression I'm losing at least 1/4 of the hops I'm putting in which would theoretically put me off by 25% of my target bitterness.

I'm using pellet hops btw.

Thanks!

David

davidgsmit said:

My question is if this will actually affect the bitterness of the beer?

Click to expand...

It's my understanding that you will have better hop utilization if you wait until after the hot break to add your hops.

I always let my wort boil for 10-15 minutes before my first hop addition to counter this.

I understand what the OP means. When I brewed partial boil extract beers, I'd get a lot of foam every time I added pellet hops. This would cause a lot of the hop matter to stick to the sides of the kettle out of the wort. I honestly don't know what to do about it, except it doesn't happen to me now with all grain brewing (maybe because there is more liquid?). I used to just scrape it back down into the wort, but I can't say if that's a good idea.

Actually I'm doing all grain... I had this thing at a very good boil (I needed to boil my volume down a bit) so I'm thinking maybe I kept getting such a big hot break on the hop additions because of the intense boil.

Regardless, I'd still like to know if this is just matter that doesn't add to the bitterness or if I should make an effort to feed it back into the mix.

Perhaps I'll just turn it down in the future for a couple of minutes as I add the hops to prevent this from happening to such an extent.

Thoughts anybody?

You could try a hop spider or a hop sock. That would keep the hops in the boil.

Hop sock... not a bad idea. May have to try that! Thanks!