Buying bulk hops

I'm planning on ordering severl pounds of hops and I'd like to know one thing. Leaf or pellets??? I'm stuck on this. What are the advantages/disadvantages of both. What do you guys get?

I personally prefer leaf hops over pellet but it can be a pain to store them properly. We use a "foodsaver" to package our bulk hops and leaf hops require more and larger bags. The bags are quite expensive and this adds to our cost. I was thinking about going all pellets on our next order but there's something cool about opening a pound of leaf and breaking out the scale.....

hoppheadIPA said:

I'm planning on ordering severl pounds of hops and I'd like to know one thing. Leaf or pellets??? I'm stuck on this. What are the advantages/disadvantages of both. What do you guys get?

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I would buy witch ever type you have been using already. I personally prefer using pellets, but plenty of other people prefer whole hops. It depends on your brewing practices.

I recently bought 11 pounds of hops from Hops Direct, and 2 of the pounds were the whole leaf variety. After usung both, I prefer pellets. They store better, take up less less space, and much easier to dry hop in a glass carboy than inserting the leaf! Plus I find that they don't leave quite as much trub in the boil kettle / fermenter.

For convenience and storage space, I prefer pellets. A whole pound of pellets fits in roughly a 1qt ziploc. You can fit only a couple of ounces of leaf hops in that same qt. ziploc.

Some say leaf will leave better dry hop aromas, but I've used both and have not noticed a difference. Although, yes the whole leafs really do have some strange cool factor to them. They make you dream of rolling around on a bed of hops.

I dont like leaf hops. They are a ***** to filter out, clogged my pump, stuck to everything, storage difficulty, need to be weighted to dry hop and multiple other things. I prefer pellets. If you have used leafs, then you don't have to worry about the things I mentioned.