Ill be dehydrating my first hop harvest. I am planning on getting mason jars for canning other things. Would it be better to dehydrate hops and can them? Or should i (unwillingly) invest in a vacuum sealer for storage?
Id like to try using hops in so other recipes besides homebrew, though i doubt the master brewer of our house will allow any hops to escape the wort.
I did find rubbing hops on chicken or throwing a few in the can shoved inside a chicken to make "beer can chicken" or "beer- butt chicken" tastes pretty good.
indeed it would be best. the problem with just stuffing the dried hops into a jar is the amount of air that they are exposed to. freezing will limit the impact of this air.I was only planning on using the jars in the same way you would jar spices after they are dried.
(...)
It does seem as though it would be best to buy a vacuum sealer.
UV barrier bags are important only if you expect the bags to be exposed to UV. they're meaningful for farmers and retailers since the product may be exposed to light while be transported, shelved, etc. for the homebrewer, UV protection is meaningless unless you're stupid and leave your hops on the windowsill. an hour's exposure to the lightbulbs in your kitchen aren't going to harm your hops.UV barrier bag means bag that is impervious to light. Most cheap vacuum bags are not UV impervious. Even some aluminized bags aren't.
First year? You won't have enough to worry about storage. They will be used up in the first brew or two. So storage isn't a big issue.
day_trippr: I NEVER get tired of that picture. More beer porn!
conpewter said:If you don't want to buy a vacuum sealer I'd suggest putting them in a ziplock bag and use a straw to suck out as much air as you can (works surprisingly well) then sip it closed as quickly as possible. Then freeze them. That'll make them last quite a while.
Ill be dehydrating my first hop harvest. I am planning on getting mason jars for canning other things. Would it be better to dehydrate hops and can them? Or should i (unwillingly) invest in a vacuum sealer for storage?
Heh heh. WRONG!
That's almost four pounds of dried cones, and that was only ~60% of my first year harvest. I used the last of my home growns this Spring...
Cheers!
This thread got me thinking (scary). So I went down to the hop freezer and started digging and found a few old jars. These are some old Nugget from '96.
[...]Ah, those are your wet weights, right? Or I'm way off on the size of the bucket.[...]
Oh, trust me. I've made way stupider (if that's a word) errors. I just wanted to make sure 1.) you were drying properly and 2.) you realized just how many hops you will some day end up with...how many hops you will have to pick, you will have to dry, you will have to store...and you will have to convince the SWMBO are important enough to spend so much time and space on.
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