Left over hops

If your reciepe calls for 1.5 oz of hops, what do you do with the left over 1/2 oz you just ordered?

Spike your beer or put them in your spagetti sauce?

I just seal them back up with a clothespin or something and save them for later.

Mike

ChickenSoop said:

If your reciepe calls for 1.5 oz of hops, what do you do with the left over 1/2 oz you just ordered?

Spike your beer or put them in your spagetti sauce?

Click to expand...

Eventually you will want to add them in addition to what the recipe calls for to a pale ale let's say to hop that recipe up a bit.

Or, you may find that a recipe calls for 1.5 oz of a hop and you only need to purchase one ounce. Do beware that hops devalue over time though.

If you have a Foodsaver, you can vacuum seal them and stick them in the freezer. I have about 2-3 pounds of hops in my freezer right now- but they weren't all leftovers. You can use them for a long time- even a couple of years if they stay sealed and frozen. If you don't have a vacuum sealer, you can close them tightly in a ziploc bag in the freezer and use them in 6 months. Then, you can use them in a recipe of your choosing!

Send them to me.

I often enjoy picking out a random hop (well, not so random, actually) out of the freezer to add at flameout. These days, though, I'm not "spending" my hops as freely until the new crops get well established & yield.

You can really vacuum and freeze them that long? Great to know, thanks. I'm about to have an extra 3/4 oz after I brew tomorrow.

Yes, definitely save them. Even without vacuum sealing, just putting them in a ziploc bag in the freezer they will keep for a couple of months anyway. I try to plan future brews to use up leftover hops before they get too old.

I add a couple of pellets to my yeast starters. There are two reasons I do that:

1.) It supposedly helps suppress infections
2.) I drink the decanted yeast starter liquid, and it simply tastes much better if there is just a hint of hoppiness to it.

This is not required, most people don't do it, and adding too many pellets can actually inhibit the yeast. But if you like tasting the evolution of your brew from start to finish, it's an option.

A ziploc bag in the freezer (squeezed to get as much air out as possible) will last pretty well. A couple of months, no trouble at all. Longer than that and you'll loose some bittering potential, but this is a gradual process. After six months they'll still be usable, just not as bitter as they originally were.

There are a number of good ways to use up small quantities of random leftover hop varieties:

- The obvious one, if you later brew another recipe that calls for the same variety.

- Slip in small amounts of some leftover variety to add complexity. For instance if I'm brewing an IPA that calls for 4 oz of Cascades, but I also have 1/2 oz Saaz in the freezer, I might just throw those in as well for luck (works best with hoppy beers where an extra half oz of something different won't throw off the overall balance too much).

- If you're brewing a recipe that only uses bittering hops, the variety doesn't make too much difference, so you can use pretty much anything you have left over. For instance I just brewed an oatmeal stout that called for 30 IBU of bittering hops, but no aroma or flavor additions. I had an ounce of Goldings left over from a Saison, and 3/4 ounce of Sterling from a much earlier amber, so in they went. I probably wouldn't have picked Sterling for a stout, but hey, that's what I had so that's what I used (beware of making random substitutions for flavor or aroma additions, though, as that can really change the character of your brew).

btw. if you're dealing with hops more than a few months old, Beer Smith has data for different hop varieties about how much alpha they lose over time, and a handy tool for calculating the results. For instance my Sterling hops started at 7% AA, but lose around 15% in six months, so the calculator shows that after 4 months in my freezer in a bag, they will be somewhere around 6.7% AA. Other varieties degrade much more quickly, so if you're using a lot of leftovers, it's worth looking up the aging rate for your particular variety.