Does anyone wet hop? (recycling hops from dry hopping)

I have a Cooper's ESB kit finishing up in primary and I'm wondering if I can reuse the hops that I dry hopped with.

If I'm not quoting some lovely brew-dream, hops were historically used first for dry hopping then boiled in wort to utilize their bitter parts. I tried a quick search here and everyone seems to call fresh hops wet hops.

When I rack this ESB to secondary (it is cloudier than chocolate milk) can I harvest the floating hop puree and freeze it for some extra IBUs on an upcoming batch?

Hops are 4-5$ an ounce up here and being the cheapass uni student I am, I'm looking for any way to reduce costs.

Fresh hops as wet hops means hops just picked off the vine and not dried but put right in the beer -- if you have them good but they only come once a year, and the taste is very different than dry hops.

I never thought about reusing dry hops, but maybe it would work, I don't know.

i think you would definatly gett a little bitterness but there would be no way in hell you could mesure bittering units for them. i have a feeling you would mess up the beer befor you made it better. i would recomend buying hops online at a cheaper price. i dont even pay a dollar an ounce for my hops online. check out hopsdirect.com

Yes, the re-use works just fine. One of the members of the Oregon Brew Crew tested this idea a couple years ago. Since the hops were not boiled, very little of the bittering resins were leached out. He even made brews using flavor and aroma hops. Aroma hops worked fairly well, but the flavor hops didn't.

I have to bump this to see if there are any more people out there who reuse their dry hops as bittering for a subsequent batch. The cheapskate in my has a hard time throwing 2-4 ounces of hops into the fermenter...

I figure I could sanitize a small paint strainer bag and put the hops in there, that way it's easy to pull it out and bag & freeze for the next batch. Thoughts?

I would just say brew different beer if price of hops is your issue. An Irish Red or something a little more malt focused. With just a 60min addition of some high alpha hops like nugget or columbus you can get decent ibu's from just one ounce.

Price isn't so much the issue, it's more of my obsessive compulsiveness to get the most out of what I do spend. I make just about every style, and both my black and regular IPA need that little something to put them from good to great. Being frugal on the dryhopping seems to be the area I need to address...