Whole Hop Absorption

I searched here already, and found a few leads, but they all ended up taking me nowhere.

Does anyone have any ball-park figures for the amount of wort absorbed by whole hops?

-walker

I am actually interested in knowing this as well, as I have a few ounces of whole hops that I picked myself back in September sitting in my fridge, and it sounds like people are losing valuable wort.

I usually sparge them anyway...as I pour my wort into the primary.

The closest thing I found to a real number (on this forum) was from david_42 who estimated that someone should throw in "a couple extra quarts of water" to account for absorption of a 3.75 oz of whole hops.

So... that number comes to (fudging things) 0.5 quarts/oz.

In another post, someone declared that they only lose "at mose a couple of cups" of liquid to hops absorption, but they never said how many oz of hops they typically use.

0.5 qt/oz seems maybe a bit high, but not totally unreasonable, but I would love to find someone who actually has some emperical data.

-walker

I don't really know...I guess Promash doesn't take this into account? Probably not...actually I think it goes in the Brew Session "Water Needed" page under "other absorption".

I'm curious, as well.

4 oz whole hops absorbed 48 oz wort when I measured this a few months ago.

I weighed the kettle after racking to fermenter on the kitchen scales (accurate to within two ounces), I then cleaned the kettle, and drained some water with the kettle tilted to the same angle as it was when I racked, and re-weighed.
The clean kettle weighed 52 ounces less, but I had added 4 ounces of hops during the boil.

-a.

I squeeze my hops to get the wort back. I do the same with the grains.

Snippity said:

I squeeze my hops to get the wort back. I do the same with the grains.

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I'm not sure that either of these are good practices. I'm almost positive that squeezing the grains is a bad thing - manual tannin extraction...blech!

ajf said:

4 oz whole hops absorbed 48 oz wort when I measured this a few months ago.

I weighed the kettle after racking to fermenter on the kitchen scales (accurate to within two ounces), I then cleaned the kettle, and drained some water with the kettle tilted to the same angle as it was when I racked, and re-weighed.
The clean kettle weighed 52 ounces less, but I had added 4 ounces of hops during the boil.

-a.

Click to expand...

awesome info! thanks.

this is lining up with other info I have dug up after an evening of google pounding.

It seems to be anywhere from 0.25 to 0.5 quart/oz, which has a mean value of 0.375. A few references said "1/3 quart", and I even saw a couple of direct "3/8 quart" and "3/4 pint" quotes (0.375).

Now... your data comes out as 0.375 qt/oz.

Who do we contact to make this official? Papazian? Palmer?

-walker

Well, this is going to make me modify my water needed chart...

Baron von BeeGee said:

Well, this is going to make me modify my water needed chart...

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LOL. I've got a spreadsheet put together that is now calculating all of my water needed, both volume and temperature, at all points along the mash and batch-sparge.

I plugged in some numbers for my recipe last Saturday and it comes out pretty damn close to the amounts of water I actually used, so I'm happy with it right now.

edit: actually, I'm coming up off by 2 quarts someplace. My only guess at the moment is that I might not have the evaporation rate right. Some of my 'constants' are coming from Papazian, some from this site, and some from physical measurements on my equipment, so there are a few places where I might have errors.

-walker

Walker-san said:

and some from physical measurements on my equipment

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Once you have the means to verify this, there is no substitute, forget what other guys get on their systems. Ball-park until you can verify what you actually get, everyone does things a little different.

FWIW, I lose maybe 1 (definitely NEVER more than 2) pints of wort using whole hops. Of course that hop stopper sucks almost every bit of wort out. I never worry about losing wort because of that.

0.30 quarts per oz leaf hop in my recent experiment.

I weighed wet hops after a batch, subtracted the dry hop weight in the batch to get kg's. I divided this by the SG to get wort liters and then converted to quarts absorbed per oz. I arrived at a figure of 0.30 qt per oz which is in line with other figures in this thread. My method has some error as the weight used for the wet hops would include some weight due to trub. I plan to repeat the experiment with hot water and leaf hops to eliminate this.

beersmith only concerns itself with ibu for leaf/pellet. why not presoak, like a grain, once saturated, it can't take on more water?

Holy Christ! I can't believe this thread got dug up out of the vault.

I am glad it got dug up. This is something I just recently needed to consider as I am going to start using whole leaf in my recipe. Now here is a different kind of question...

This is probably a long shot, but certain properties of osmosis and ability of leafs to absorb liquid start to make me think it might be a possibility.

Would the hops soak up wort, or water? meaning, even though the sugars and fermentables are dissolved, the hops may separate the dissolved sugar from the water, meaning it would ultimately increase the SG.

Also, can I just add extra water at the boil to make up for the absorption? or would it be advantageous to put it into the mash to accumulate a higher efficiency?

Thanks in advance.

I'm redigging it up, because, for the life of me, its the only way I can account for like a gallon or more lost... I had my sight glass showing 6.5 gallons pre boil, about 5.5 post... I drained into my fermenter and its like 4 gallons at best... I assume my 7oz of whole leaf hops for my IIPA sucked out a **** ton of water, and now there's not much I can do about that. I heard a guesstimate of .3 qts per oz, thats 2.1 qts which is a half a gallon... so either some friendly wort ghost drank a ton, or I absorbed a LOT more than that in 7 oz...? Any other ideas?

pompeiisneaks said:

I'm redigging it up, because, for the life of me, its the only way I can account for like a gallon or more lost... I had my sight glass showing 6.5 gallons pre boil, about 5.5 post... I drained into my fermenter and its like 4 gallons at best... I assume my 7oz of whole leaf hops for my IIPA sucked out a **** ton of water, and now there's not much I can do about that. I heard a guesstimate of .3 qts per oz, thats 2.1 qts which is a half a gallon... so either some friendly wort ghost drank a ton, or I absorbed a LOT more than that in 7 oz...? Any other ideas?

Click to expand...

Was the 5.5 post boil a measurement from before or after chilling?

You "lose" volume as you chill because the liquid gets more dense. About 1 quart of shrinkage takes place in a 5 gallon batch.

Yes its post boil, I have a sightglass... It was at about 5.5 to almost 6 gallons... I can imagine that... but when I ran it through the chiller, I had at most 4 gallons... my 6 gallon fermenter has a good 1/3 almost left empty (minus the krauesen right now of course ) So if I subtract 1qt, that leaves me 3-6ish quarts still unaccounted for.

pompeiisneaks said:

Yes its post boil, I have a sightglass...

Click to expand...

I had actually asked it if was before or after CHILLING, but I think the rest of your text implies that it was before chilling, so that explains some of it.

If you read back through the history in here from when I was trying to find the number to use for this in my calculations, I had seen quotes as large as 0.5qt/oz on the web. If you had that much absorption, that would account for 3.5 quarts in your hops. Add the shrinkage for chilling, and you could account for over 1 gallon of volume loss.

IMO, It's really hard to judge the volume in the carboy if you don't have it marked. In my 6.5 gallon carboys, it only takes about 0.75" in depth to hold 1/2 gallon of wort, so eyeballing things could give you a big error.

5 gallons in my 6.5 carboys leaves a lot of space at the top of the carboy.

I have actually measured this using a french press. A hard press got a little bit less than half a quart per ounce of hops. There is nothing wrong with sparging them or squeezing them in my experience. None of my beers have had noticeable tannins and all of them have had the hops pressed.

Walker, sorry I meant to clarify that, I got your question, and yes I think later I accidentally made it more clear. That does seem to line up w/ what I'm guessing, and yes I could be off more than I think in my guess too. I'll know better when I transfer to my kegs... they hold 5 gals obviously and I'll see how 'low' it is.

Thanks.

I think using a large french press to reduce wort loss
Is a fabulous idea. I've been mulling it over but haven't got
Round to buying a big one for this purpose. For those who
Use this technique already I would love to hear more about
It...what size press and when the best time in the process to
Use it is would all b e great info. Thanks!

I measured 0.146 quarts/ounce here: Leaf Hop Absorption Measured