Poor man's Hop Back simulator

Hi All,
Ive had an idea on how to simulate hopbacking without all the equipment. Tell me what you think:

Around the time your wort starts to boil, fill a medium sized pyrex bowl with water. Microwave to boil. Throw in hops. Cover (fyi, this is airtight.) Swirl gently while your wort boils. After you cool your wort, throw the "hopbacked" water into it.

Thoughts?

It sounds more like you're making a hop tea...

if you're going to do that, just do some knockout additions (when you turn off the burner). i find the hopback to have be useful for not only adding a fresh hop pop to beers, but also filtering out all the hot break and other misc junk.

Atl300zx said:

if you're going to do that, just do some knockout additions (when you turn off the burner). i find the hopback to have be useful for not only adding a fresh hop pop to beers, but also filtering out all the hot break and other misc junk.

Click to expand...

Well, I thought that rather than a flameout addition, having it sit much longer in the hot/warm water for much longer amount of time might extract more aroma.
No?

Yes it may, but as the person above my first post stated, you're essentially making a hop tea. Hop teas became popular during the hop shortage b/c you could get more hop flavor/aroma with less hops making teas. There is a lot of literature on here and the rest of the internet about the benefits/drawbacks of hop teas. A hopback to me is more about filtration though.

Very interesting, thanks.

I think another benefit of a hopback is that as the hot wort goes through the hopback it extracts oils that wouldn't be extracted at cool temps...but the wort then immediately goes through a heat exchanger and chills the wort so the volatile oils are not evaporated off like they would be at high temps. Having the hops sit in that hot liquor for so long seems like it would vaporize those oils. Keeping the bowl covered would capture some of that but I don't know how effective it would be.

A while back I made a little still on my stove (a la Alton Brown from the 'Hooked on Baklava' episode of Good Eats) and put distilled water and hops in it and condensed the vapor. Based on what I got from that, plus a little reading, leads me to believe that you actually WANT some of those first/early volatile oils out of there because they are harsh and not all that pleasing. It was like I had 'harvested' alot of the bad stuff and very little good stuff on the first 'run' of that still. But big guys (and some homebrewers) still appear to use them so whatdoiknow. I'm not much of a hophead anyway.