Oz. vs. Oz.

My cascades are comming along real well. I think I might have enough for a brew with these first year plants. Is an ounce of whole leaf (home grown) the same as an ounce of say, store bought pellets? Assuming the AAU's are the same.

Or if there is a thread already on this, can someone point me in the right direction? thanks

Pellets are about 10% more effecient than "real" cones when the whole leaf are fresh, the older they get the more you have to use to keep up with pellets, which store a lot longer.

So would I be better using the fresh cones for dry hopping?

someone who has used fresh hops (which i haven't) will be able to give you more specific, but fresh hops, also called wet hops, weigh much more than dry hops because they have all that water in them. In other words, it takes a greater weight of wet hops.

If you dry them, then its similar.

If the weight is the same,and the % alpha acids are the same, the hops will be the same (or similar enough) to use without concern. However, if you use freshly picked wet hops, they weigh 5-8x more than dried hops, and therefore you need to do some math and a bit of guessing to use wet hops in the boil. Most homegrowers use dried hops for aroma hops either very late in the boil or for dry hopping since we do not know the %AA. I keep my dried homegrown cascade for this purpose, and add at flame out or dry hop.

I have made a few great wet hopped beers with my cascades I assume 6x the recipe weight at 5.5% AA (average for cascade). My last all cascade wet hopped IPA used nearly 2 lbs of wet cascade (equaling about 6 oz dry hops if I were to follow the regular hopping schedule). Another angle to take is to only use the wet hops for flavor and aroma and use dried hops (whole or pellet) of a known %AA for the bulk of the bittering.

Hope this helps.

Tim

Would cutting up the hops (at least in half) increase utilization or do you just chuck em in as they were on the bines?

beerocd said:

Would cutting up the hops (at least in half) increase utilization or do you just chuck em in as they were on the bines?

Click to expand...

Hmm, never thought of that. Might help, but then you have a hard time calculating the utilization as brewing calculators are set to either whole hops or to pellet hops, not chopped up hops. You can try it out for sure. There may be something out there in cyberspace about this.